Re: [gentoo-user] Realtek r8169 realtek.ko not loaded.

[Victor Ivanov <vic.m.ivanov@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2956 bytes --]

Hi Alexander,

A while back I had the exact same issue with a remote machine that I am
managing. It has an Asus B45-M mobo with an r8169 chipset. Ever since
the 5.2.x kernel family - where it last used to work - it has been a pain.

Initially I added a manual "soft" dependency in "/etc/conf.d/modules" as
William has suggested to you with "realtek" appearing first in the list.
But this stopped working following an update to 5.4.x and is still the
case today with the 5.6.x family (I keep testing it once in a while).

I then decided to build both realtek and r8169 modules into the kernel:

    REALTEK_PHY=y
    CONFIG_R8169=y

It did require a bit of faff as the whole chain of dependencies from
REALTEK_PHY had to be built in as well, but I think that was about 5-6
kernel options in total.

Adding it to the ramdisk as William suggests might work too. In my case
I didn't bother trying this due to the fact that every failed attempted
required manual intervention by someone to get the machine booted with
working kernel.

I have a gut feeling that tells me adding it to the initrd probably
won't work. But if you're planning on trying it, please keep us posted.
I would be very interested in hearing your solution.

Regards,
V

On 17/05/2020 09:07, Alexander Puchmayr wrote:
> Hi there
> 
> I just upgraded an older notebook with r8169 network chip to new kernel 5.4 
> (sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-5.4.28) with genkernel. 
> After booting the new kernel the network adapter was not initialized, no 
> network interface eth0.
> Dmesg says
> [    6.390973] r8169 0000:08:00.0: realtek.ko not loaded, maybe it needs to be 
> added to initramfs?
> [    6.392864] r8169: probe of 0000:08:00.0 failed with error -2
> 
> After searching with google I found a thread in the kernel mailing list
> https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204343
> The cause is a soft depencency to module realtek.ko, which needs to be loaded 
> first.
> 
> Doing this manually, i.e. rmmod r8169 && modprobe realtek && modprobe r8169 
> works fine; network interface eth0 gets configured and is operating.
> 
> Since the kernel loads the network module before systemd is running, it has to 
> be configured in initrd somehow.
> So, the final question is, how to get that into initrd with genkernel?
> I need to add something like this
> 
> cat /etc/modprobe.d/realtek 
> Softdep r8169 pre: realtek
> 
> How do I get this into initrd with genkernel-next?
> 
> Thanks in advance
> 	Alex
> 
> PS 
> Profile:
> default/linux/amd64/17.0/desktop/plasma/systemd
> 
> Relevant packages:
> sys-apps/gentoo-systemd-integration-7
> sys-apps/kmod-26-r5
> sys-apps/systemd-244.3
> sys-kernel/genkernel-next-69
> sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-5.4.28
> 
> Lspci
> 08:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 
> PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 03)
> 
> 
> 
> 


[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 833 bytes --]