Linux and the RealTek RTL8129/8139 Chips This page contains information on using Linux with the RTL8129 and RTL8139 Fast Ethernet Controllers for PCI. The master copy of this page resides on the WWW server.

The is available from this web page. This driver was written to support the Beowulf cluster project at CESDIS. For Beowulf-specific information, read the. This driver is for the RealTek 8129 and 8139 chips only. The 8019 and 8029 chips are unrelated designs.

They are PCI NE2000 clones, and are supported by updates to the NE2000 driver available from the. Usage instructions Read the page for instructions. You should, of course, substitute the 'rtl8139.c' as the driver file name. Programming info:Online information is available at Support Support for the RTL8139 driver is handled through the mailing lists for bug reports and problems, and for news and general information. Do not use the -announce mailing list for questions! To subscribe or unsubscribe to a list, send a message with the contents 'subscribe' (or 'unsubscribe') to the list name with an appended '-request' e.g.: echo subscribe /bin/mail linux-realtek-announce-request@beowulf.gsfc.nasa.gov to get on the low-volume information list, and echo subscribe /bin/mail linux-realtek-request@beowulf.gsfc.nasa.gov if you want to know more about bugs and driver development. The most recent testing version may be available from.

If this link is invalid, the released version is the most recent publically available driver. At Our Bodoni Regular Free. Diagnotic program Two diagnostic programs are available, mii-diag and rtl8139-diag. Full documentation is available from the page. The program allows examining the link status and configuring the transceiver. The is used to examine the device registers, EEPROM values, and MII transceiver management registers.

Hey, I'm having some trouble installin my new PCI card RTL-8139D. I've tried downloading the drivers from over 20 diferent sites and none of them is.

The command for compiling this program is at the bottom of the source file. This program may optionally be compiled with an additional by using the following compile command: cc -o rtl8139-diag -O -DLIBMII rtl8139-diag.c libmii.c Driver Operation and Comments The RTL8129 series is a low-cost design, and thus should be considered a 'connectivity solution' rather a performance-oriented product. The RTL8139 series improves on the integration and feature set, adding advanced features such as 802.3x Flow Control and incorporating the transceiver onto a single chip. The data transfer engine remains the same, with much improved PCI burst performance in the B and C versions.

While the chip is a bus master, it's not a descriptor-based bus master. The receive side transfers packets into a single linear ring (compile-time selectable as 8KB, 16KB, 32KB or 64KB) in host memory. The driver immediately copies the packets from the ring to newly-allocated buffers ('skbuffs').

Most other Fast Ethernet designs use a descriptor-based architecture, which allows packets the chip to transfer directly into pre-allocated maximum-sized skbuffs. The driver then optionally copies only tiny packets into smaller-sized skbuffs. On the transmit side four register sets hold the address and size of the packets to be transmitted. While this results in a rather small, fixed-size transmit queue, four entries is adequate for full performance in most environments.

The transmit performance loss comes from an initially undocumented (yes, that means it took many hours to find) word-alignment requirement of the current chip. Linux cache-aligns the IP header and following payload data when constructing a packet. When the 14 byte Ethernet header is prepended, the complete packet is 2-byte aligned, but not 4-byte aligned. The result is that all IP packets must be copied to an alignment buffer before being queued for transmit. RTL8129/RTL8139 Multicast Support The RTL chips can match a single unicast address (their own station address) and support a 64 slot statistical (aka hash) filter for initial filtering of unwanted multicast packets. This filter functionality appears to be implemented the 'usual' way: taking the CRC intermediate result just after destination address arrives, and using six bits as the index into a table of which multicast packets are acceptable.