Realtek RTL8101E/RTL8102E stops working after suspend to ram/disk

Refractor · 11-13-2013, 12:03 AM

Greetings!
Slackware64 14.0 here,
was working fine until 2 days ago, when I had to move my laptop to a friend's apartament. I suspended (to RAM) and when I moved the laptop eth0's MAC was ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff and it wasn't working, dmesg output didn't show anything after that. Reboot didn't work. I had to power off, remove battery and charger and then turn on the laptop in order to get the NIC working. I tried unloading/loading the r8169 module after suspension and while it unloaded successfully, the loading had this strange output:

Code:

r8169 0000:07:00.0: eth0: RTL8101e at 0xffffc9000007c000, ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff, XID 9cf0f8ff IRQ 18

After a full powercycle the output is a bit different:

Code:

r8169 0000:07:00.0: eth0: RTL8102e at 0xffffc9000007c000, 1c:75:08:67:18:55, XID 04e00000 IRQ 43

I don't know if the IRQs or those XIDs are supposed to be consistent, but obviously, they're not.
I am assuming a hardware failure, since a full reboot is not fixing the issue, but complete turn off does.

What's your opinion, is there any possibility for this to be a software/kernel issue or my problem is hardware-based?
Thanks in advance!

pan64 · 11-13-2013, 12:42 AM

probably you have two drivers RTL8101e and RTL8102e. The first one is not working and you need to use only the other one. if not sure you can try to remove all the drivers and download one from realtek.

Refractor · 11-14-2013, 05:44 AM

The driver is just r8169, but the NIC was randomly identified as either RTL8101e or RTL8102e. Both use the r8169 module, but I suppose that they have differences and when it's not detected properly it fails. It must be a kernel problem because last night I upgraded to 14.1, which upgraded the kernel and now it's okay, it works consistently across reboots and suspensions.
Thanks!