How is Realtek Reliability These Days?

[mattlach]

Hey everyone,

I've playing with x86 server hardware for a good two decades now.

IN most of that time, the rule of thumb has always been if you are doing something that requires reliability, always, always, always go with the Intel NIC, and no matter what, avoid anything Realtek.

But in recent years things seem to ahve changed a little bit.   Intel has had some issues with their multigig NIC chips, and many people are - GASP - even recommending Realtek chips as alternatives.

Apparently pigs are flying, cats are sleeping with dogs, and snowballs are surviving in hell.

So, I guess my question is this.   How reliable are Realtek chips in something like OPNSense these days?

I am planning on building an embedded system, and locating it remotely where it is inconvenient (but not impossible) to get at should it go unresponsive.

Meanwhile I am seeing some really attractive embedded industrial boards with dual Realtek 8111H ports on them.

Are the old paradigms still true?   Would it be a bad idea to use one of these?   Or is it fine these days?

I'd appreciate any input.

[meyergru]

Realtek is still problematic under FreeBSD. Avoid it if you can.

[Gianry]

So, I guess my question is this.   How reliable are Realtek chips in something like OPNSense these days?

I am planning on building an embedded system, and locating it remotely where it is inconvenient (but not impossible) to get at should it go unresponsive.

Meanwhile I am seeing some really attractive embedded industrial boards with dual Realtek 8111H ports on them.

  Or is it fine these days?

I'd appreciate any input.

ù

I've build a VM image with opnsense and I'm using a 4 port Realtek Nic card .For now I've not found any issue about it

[franco]

The vendor driver is pretty good, but you should avoid older (ancient) chipsets. If you can spend a little extra money for Intel NICs. It's not worth any of the trouble dealing with runtime issues.


Cheers,
Franco

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Does the vendor driver still not use iflib? If yes, it might stop working altogether at some point in time in the future depending on FreeBSD's ongoing development.

[franco]

I don't expect anyone wanting to break out of tree drivers, but stranger things have happened.


Cheers,
Franco

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Once all in tree drivers are finally iflib-ified, I fully expect legacy support to go away, eventually.

[franco]

Looking at ancient unrelated cruft such as ALTQ and agp(4) I doubt that. Making iflib the in-tree entry bar is reasonable though. But that could already be the policy now.


Cheers,
Franco

[Patrick M. Hausen]

agp(4)

I get your point 

[franco]

Good Dublin memories 

[Greg_E]

Is it the drivers making the hardware bad or is it the hardware making the drivers difficult?

That said, even Broadcom can have problems with some systems. Intel is the preferred fix for many things that just don't make sense and are hard to pin down. XCP-NG comes to mind as one of these Broadcom warnings where people have fixed odd things by using Intel cards.

[Monviech (Cedrik)]

I mean you could do some heretical things like putting windows 11 on the realtek nic box and use hyper-v and opnsense as VM on that. 

[Greg_E]

Or Virtual Box should also work.

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Is it the drivers making the hardware bad or is it the hardware making the drivers difficult?

The hardware is notoriously crappy in the "the cheapest design one can get away with" sense. And you don't get documentation without signing an NDA. So it's difficult to produce a true open source driver.

[Greg_E]

I noticed that VSphere8 doesn't support Realtek for the management lan, but I can try to pass a Realtek through to hosts. I say try because it caused some problems as soon as I checked the box to pass through. Might also be because I'm still learning that system.