Well, I cursed myself... Asus/Intel IGC ethernet just quits working....

arfon · 01-02-2023, 04:04 PM

"I'm also happy to report that Slackware 15 supported the new board's (Asus ROG Ryzen) video, audio, and ethernet chipset with no problems. I usually have to fight with one of these with a brand new board."

Never post something like this for at least a week after installing new hardware.

New weirdness. The built-in (Intel IGC) ethernet NIC is going stupid. It worked fine for 3 days then the network was unreachable.

ifconfig showed eth0 there but no IP.

I tried:

Code:

ifconfig eth0 down; ifconfig eth0 up
/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 restart_eth0
/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 restart
rmmod igc; modprobe igc; ifconfig eth0 up

..and none worked. As a matter of fact, if you

Code:

ifconfig eth0 down

the NIC isn't even seen after that. You'll get a "No such device" on any commands afterwards.

Reboot the machine and it will work for about 5 minutes then goes stupid again.

A USB ethernet dongle works fine.

I read somewhere that it could be the Asus BIOS powering down the NIC but, I could find no settings in the BIOS for that. I tried passing the kernel parameter to disable that and it didn't work.

Daedra · 01-02-2023, 04:21 PM

What is your exact board model. Some of the recent Asus boards have the Intel I225-V chip which has three revisions. revision 1 and 2 are complete garbage with revision 3 supposedly fixing the issues, but people have said they are still seeing problems with it. Intel now has the I226-V chip on some very new boards, but I haven't heard any thing about it. Google "intel i225-v problems"

kingbeowulf · 01-02-2023, 04:58 PM

In addition, check 'lspci' and 'dmesg' to see if the NIC shows up. If it does, check for correct kernel firmware, if not then BIOS. Wih very new boards, check also for a UEFI/BIOS update, esp. for a rev 1.0 motherboard.

arfon · 01-02-2023, 07:42 PM

Slackware64 - current

dmidecode
Manufacturer: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC.
Product Name: ROG STRIX B550-F GAMING
Version: Rev X.0x

from the box
Part No: 90MB14S0-MVAAY0

No version/revision listed.

lspci
06:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Controller I225-V (rev 03)

dmesg
[ 7.934754] Intel(R) 2.5G Ethernet Linux Driver
[ 7.935467] igc 0000:06:00.0: PCIe PTM not supported by PCIe bus/controller
[ 7.991797] igc 0000:06:00.0 (unnamed net_device) (uninitialized): PHC added
[ 8.016925] igc 0000:06:00.0: 4.000 Gb/s available PCIe bandwidth (5.0 GT/s PCIe x1 link)
[ 8.017226] igc 0000:06:00.0 eth0: MAC: 50:eb:f6:ce:af:b7

Intel Corporation Ethernet Controller I225-V = IGC kernel module:

lsmod
"igc 135168 0"

What gets me is why did it work for 3 days??

keefaz · 01-02-2023, 08:08 PM

Maybe it changed eth name? Could you try /sbin/ifconfig -a to check?

I have this udev rule to keep the name on eth0

Code:

# cat /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"

(obviously use ethernet mac address for xx:xx...)

Pixxt · 01-02-2023, 09:57 PM

Intel i225-v chips are infamous for being broken and causing a ton of problems.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ASUS/commen...is_good_avoid/

https://old.reddit.com/r/intel/comme..._rant_warning/

There's tens of dozens of threads from all over the net stating the issues with them.

arfon · 01-02-2023, 11:28 PM

keefaz - I've got the same udev rule... Deleting it didn't help either.

Pixxt - I think you're right. I keep seeing post after post about IGC wonkiness...

I'm just gonna throw in a PCI ethernet card and not even use the built-in.

keefaz · 01-03-2023, 03:23 AM

Could you post a few lines of dmesg after the igc line with mac address ?
(complete output with dmesg | grep igc)

arfon · 01-03-2023, 07:08 AM

New quirk that I noticed.... When you plug/unplug a USB device, the network dies... I'm using a USB ethernet adapter so it may be that or, I wonder if it's more Intel driver stupidity.

Quote:

Could you post a few lines of dmesg after the igc line with mac address ?

I could but it's all garbage. Mostly sound card being brought up.

This is the important part: "kernel: igc: Failed to read reg 0xc030!"

Which leads me to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/co...ler_i225v_igc/

Daedra · 01-03-2023, 09:52 AM

When I built my system in December 2020 I specifically researched the NIC because I always try to get an Intel NIC instead of the Realtek chips that most motherboard manufacturers use. I also have the I225-V revision 3, but so far it hasn't given me any issues. But there is definitely something wrong with these chips since all the reported issues are almost always exactly one of these three issues...

1) Card completely disappears from the system
2) Network drops after a specific period of time.
3) speed gets cut in half or more during heavy traffic (above 1G).

talo · 01-03-2023, 12:45 PM

Dear Arfon,

I had such a problem which an ASUS X99-A USB 3.1 motherboard. Each time the internet was lost but automatically reconnected,
under Slackware x64 14.2.
I did put the following lines in rc.local (with explanation)

ethtool -s eth2 wol d
# reported elsewhere
# ethtool -K eth2 gso off gro off tso off
# also noticed another solution was to disable Active-State Power Management
# pcie_aspm=off
# reported didn't have any effect.

# I've had similar problem with one of my servers at work.
# Turns out (in my case) it was a bug in the TSO driver code that over a certain load causes the driver to hang.
# To overcome the problem, I put this command at boot:
# Code:

ethtool -K eth2 tso off

Maybe it helps,

talo

arfon · 01-04-2023, 05:57 PM

Good news and more of an explanation-

EXPLANATION: The on-board eth NIC just dies after a few moments now. Mod stays loaded but IP LINK and IFCONFIG UP commands just return "No such device". When using a USB NIC, data is SLOW and sporatic and it dies when you plug/unplug a USB thumbdrive. So it looks like there's USB module issues on this Asus board.

GOOD NEWS: I disabled the on-board NIC and installed a PCI NIC and it (probably cursing myself here) seems to be working fine. Even the USB weirdness doesn't seem to affect it.