Warning about RealTek adapters - again!

[JohnSchnee]

When you read the thread you will find that it is an incompatibility of Realtek 8126 / 8127 devices with X570 chipsets that cannot be healed by drivers, since the device is not even detected. It is a hardware incompatibility.

I read *you* assuming it is an Hardware issue, but from the problems you describe, its a 100% not general hardware compability issue.

On your own article on Computerbase you self write "Daraus ergab sich der Verdacht, dass die über den X570-Chipsatz angebundenen PCIe-4.0-Slots instabil arbeiten."

So you were now talking about unstable PCIe Lanes on your Board, so tell me, is it a card issue, a board issue or even a specific Problem with your board?

I just don't understand single users detecting something, and assume this problem affects the whole Chipset, while only a single Board was used for testing.

It's just not representative, to test one board with one/two cards, and then warn about the card when it's a chipset Issue, or even just one bad PCB...

Best example is my friend with a RTL8127 on a Gigabyte X570 Board without any issues for 3 months now. (Yuanley Card from Amazon)

Another factor: With PCIe 4.0 bad routing of the PCIe traces on the card or on the mainboad or even bad EMI can cause training issues.

But as I said I have various evidence that a missing card at boot time can but not always be caused by bad drivers.

My personal and not verified theory is, that the OS failes to communicate power states, leaving the IC in a soft-bricked state.

So yes, I read the thread and I appreciate the time you put in it, but no, I'm not convinced it's a general X570 or hardware issue.

You are talking about Windows but the most issues you will see on this Forum are on the OPNsense/FreeBSD side so I guess most people don't use them for their Clients or don't use Windows at all ;)

In this thread it was about Windows.. And drivers are somehow important regardless of the OS.

All I wanted to point out that include the network drivers in the private patch cycles or troubleshooting, can be worth, but it will not fix every problem.

Best regards!

[meyergru]

Would you admit that it cannot be the OS drivers when the card is not detected in the BIOS before the OS even boots (which was the case)?

The cards definitely sometimes were not detected on the PCIe bus, which I also told in the Computerbase thread. Also, I linked several other reports about those instabilities here: https://www.computerbase.de/forum/threads/erfahrungsbericht-realtek-rtl8126-rtl8127-instabilitaeten-auf-x570-pcie-4-0.2265596/post-31314530

Also, I noticed corrupted data, which destroyed my Windows installation a few times and even became noticeable as data errors on a restore, so I definitely can say there was a hardware problem. Had it been on the ethernet wire, it would have got detected and corrected, but there is no such correction on the PCIe bus.

Thus, I know for a fact that there were signaling problems between my X570 mainboard and two different specimens of modern Realtek adapters (one 8126 and one 8127). There are reports of other people experiencing similar results, which is not to say that it cannot be the mainboard that was at fault. Yet, these problems were not present with any other brand NIC that I tried.

Potentially, there are EMI problem with higher PCIe rates, but whatever the case, the drivers played no role in this.

[JohnSchnee]

Hi,

I don't want to argue, but from what I experienced with the Docks and the USB Ethernet, I would not say a 100% that its not the driver.

As I mentioned, the docks needed a full powercycle to revocer the LAN-Port. It went away with new drivers. I never had this kind of issue with PCIe Cards.

It may be worth to name your specific card vendor, to sort out that this specific vendor has some quality issues at a PCB Level.

Best example for this is with the Broadcom 5720 Card - look at the Parts Count of both PCBs, one is as double as expensive with the same Chipset as the other.

If the cheapo card had problems, then it would be likely due to omitting components and not the BCM-Chip beeing just a bad Chip.

[meyergru]

As I said, I had two cards from different vendors. When you look at the RTL8126/7 pinouts, you will find that the chip is directly connected to the PCIe lanes, giving the PCB manufacturer little to vary, except for routing the connections. Of course there may be problems with power filtering and such.

BTW: I do not have those cards any more, as the ASUS NIC - which is based on another chip - works nicely, as discussed.

A driver problem that is not cleared up during the next boot would explain the initialisation failures, but not the data corruption - the latter strongly suggests a signaling problem. I am using Occam's Razor here because a signaling problem explains both symptoms. I did not investigate any further because I lack the exquipment and skills to verify the finding and it simply was not worth the effort for me.

[moonman]

I have x570 motherboard (AsRock x570 Phantom Gaming 4) with 5950x. I used to have AQC113 (non-C) installed into the bottom PCIe x1 slot and it was working fine at Gen4 speeds. The card itself was x4, but AsRock has those open ended slots where you can actually insert any card in them. I also made sure to get AQC113 and not AQC113C or other variant as that the one wiht PCIe Gen4 support. HWINFO64 confirmed it was Gen4 x1 speeds and iperf3 as well. The only problem was that every time I made my computer go to sleep it would come back with a non-working LAN. I had to reboot (or hibernate) for the card to start working again.

I bought rtl8127 card from amazon and it's working flawlessly in the same slot now. No issues at all.

My point, meyergru, it could be just your particular motherboard and not all x570 motherboards out there.

[meyergru]

That is perfectly possible, but see #24.

I have to make three corrections to formerly discussed points, though:

1. PCIe actually has its own mechanisms for data-integrity protection between the card and CPU/chipset: LCRC with link-level replay can detect and recover transmission errors, ECRC can provide additional end-to-end error detection, and AER can report PCIe errors.
This means that the observed data corruption may have occurred somewhere outside the portion protected by PCIe's link-level CRC/replay mechanism.

2. The X570S chipset was formerly believed to be different from the X570, yet there is no proof of that. On the contrary, ASRock said it was only fine-tuning that made passive cooling possible. Other manufacturers made claims to this as well.

3. In the meantime, my counter-proof to the PCIe initialisation on warm boots was contradicted - see: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/ae1737e7339b513f8c2fc21b500a0fc215d155c3 and https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220770

Maybe this was an implementation fault in either the Windows driver, defective NICs or bad board layout on Asrock's behalf - I cannot tell nor investigate, because I do not have the cards any more. All I can say is that the problems existed and were solved by switching to the other NIC - which also has the advantage of being able to fully use 10 GbE over my 17m CAT5 link, which could not reliably be achieved with either an X550 or X540 before.

On a side note: chalk those inaccuracies up to my discontent about having to investigate such problems for weeks when I just wanted to have more speed on my main workstation.