Ethernet driver suckage

[CrystalCowboy]

This discussion area is for "Technical support and discussion of the open-source xf86-video-intel driver <b>and other Intel Linux software projects</b>," so I'm going to take advantage of that to ask about ethernet driver support. I recently switched to Scientific Linux 6.1, which is a free distribution based on the Red Hat Enterprise source. I have had problems with both the e1000e driver and the r8169 ethernet drivers. I managed to overcome the former by switching to a different version; the latter is still an issue, especially under heavy traffic.

This is not the sort of issue I expected to encounter when I switched to an enterprise-class distribution. I should think somebody should be embarrassed by this.

[RealNC]

I had the same problem. The kernel-provided R8169 does not work correctly for all chips; it just happens to "somewhat work" but craps out after some time. The R8168 driver solved all my problems:

http://www.realtek.com/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=13&PFid=5&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false#2

I don't know if Arch has a package for it; I use Gentoo which does so I don't need to install it manually. I found this for Arch:

http://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/i686/r8168/

Edit: Oops, for some reason I thought you were using Arch. I've no idea about SL. You might have to install it manually.

[CrystalCowboy]

r8168 did the job for me too. In SL6.1 I found packages at el repo for kmod-r8168 and kmod-r8169.

kmod-r8168 provides a better driver for the specific hardware

kmod-r8169 tells the r8169 to not recognize the hardware so r8168 can take it over.

e1000e still sucks though, I have found only one version that works well on my hardware.