26.1 upgrade chaos, Realtek unusable, critical packages removed/disabled

[nero355]

RTL8111E

AFAIK that's a very old RealTek NIC Chip used as Onboard NIC for a lot of devices and might be declared as EOL by the people who build the FreeBSD Kernel so you could check that and see if there is a solution available for those who want to use it anyway ?

[drosophila]

I seem to remember that both my NICs also are RE8111E, but I can't physically look at them ATM. Maybe you could do a "pciconf -lvvv" on the console and see what it says and compare it to mine:

re0@pci0:3:0:0:    class=0x020000 rev=0x01 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x10ec device=0x8168 subvendor=0x10ec subdevice=0x8168
    vendor     = 'Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.'
    device     = 'RTL8111/8168/8211/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet
re1@pci0:4:0:0:    class=0x020000 rev=0x11 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x10ec device=0x8168 subvendor=0x1849 subdevice=0x8168
    vendor     = 'Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.'
    device     = 'RTL8111/8168/8211/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet

As you can see from the revision, the re0 is quite ancient (compared to the re1 that also is over a decade old; the manual claims it is a RTL8111GR though, so not RTL8111E). The vendor driver has recently ceased to support the RTL84xx chips, but that version is only in the 26.7 so that shouldn't be your issue (the above output is from 26.1.11_10, with the realtek vendor driver that obviously still supports the 84xx).

The age shows (dmesg excerpt):

[1] pcib3: <ACPI PCI-PCI bridge> irq 18 at device 28.2 on pci0
[1] pci1: <ACPI PCI bus> on pcib3
[1] re0: <Realtek PCIe GbE Family Controller> port 0xe000-0xe0ff mem 0xd0700000-0xd0700fff irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci1
[1] re0: Using Memory Mapping!
[1] re0: Using line-based interrupt
[1] re0: version:1.102.01
[1] re0: Ethernet address: <censored>
[1]
[1] This product is covered by one or more of the following patents:           
[1] US6,570,884, US6,115,776, and US6,327,625.
[1] re0: Ethernet address: <censored>
[1] pcib4: <ACPI PCI-PCI bridge> irq 19 at device 28.3 on pci0
[1] pci2: <ACPI PCI bus> on pcib4
[1] re1: <Realtek PCIe GbE Family Controller> port 0xd000-0xd0ff mem 0xd0604000-0xd0604fff,0xd0600000-0xd0603fff irq 19 at device 0.0 on pci2
[1] re1: Using Memory Mapping!
[1] re1: Using 1 MSI-X message
[1] re1: ASPM disabled
[1] re1: version:1.102.01
[1] re1: Ethernet address: <censored>
[1]
[1] This product is covered by one or more of the following patents:           
[1] US6,570,884, US6,115,776, and US6,327,625.
[1] re1: Ethernet address: <censored>

[computer_freak_8]

AFAIK that's a very old RealTek NIC Chip used as Onboard NIC for a lot of devices and might be declared as EOL by the people who build the FreeBSD Kernel so you could check that and see if there is a solution available for those who want to use it anyway ?

Yes, it's old - that's why I'm using this machine as a firewall box rather than a general-purpose computer.
I suppose it's *possible* that the upstream devs went to the work of removing support for some RTL8111 flavors while leaving other RTL8111 flavors supported, but that seems implausible.

Also, that wouldn't (shouldn't) affect the proprietary driver package, which as noted, also doesn't work, even though Realtek says it's the same driver for both the working and non-working chipset flavors.

[tangofan]

AFAIK that's a very old RealTek NIC Chip used as Onboard NIC for a lot of devices and might be declared as EOL by the people who build the FreeBSD Kernel so you could check that and see if there is a solution available for those who want to use it anyway ?

Yes, it's old - that's why I'm using this machine as a firewall box rather than a general-purpose computer.
I suppose it's *possible* that the upstream devs went to the work of removing support for some RTL8111 flavors while leaving other RTL8111 flavors supported, but that seems implausible.

You could test, if native FreeBSD (15.1 IIRC) boots on your system (e.g. from a USB flash drive) with network drivers enabled. If it doesn't, then you'd need to take your problem upstream.

Does your system have a free PCIe slot? Then buy a cheap used NIC (e.g. on eBay) that is known to work well with FreeBSD and put it in your system. (I don't have such a list of NICs, but I'm using Intel i226-V on my OPNsense and it's been working without a problem.)

[nero355]

Does your system have a free PCIe slot? Then buy a cheap used NIC (e.g. on eBay) that is known to work well with FreeBSD and put it in your system.
(I don't have such a list of NICs, but I'm using Intel i226-V on my OPNsense and it's been working without a problem.)

IMHO any Intel NIC with 1 Gbps or 2,5 Gbps ports will do :)

And if you want to be 101% sure you can check out the config file of the current FreeBSD 15.1 Kernel to see which chipsets are included at the moment.