Realtek Network on Gigabyte Z890 Motherboard not recognized by IFL 405

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I've been doing drive to drive copies, but now I'm noticing that IFL doesn't show a network connection when booting off of USB on this system with a Z890UD motherboard.

During the on-screen boot report it says DHCP is [Done], but "ip a" from the terminal shows only 127.0.0.0, and attempting a mount shows network unreachable.

Is there any way to debug network drivers, and if necessary, add them to the IFL boot drive?

Edit - I copied the dmesg output. I don't see anything about the Ethernet NIC, but I do see that it attempts and fails to load the on-board Wi-Fi.

Edit2 - I looked at the output of lsmod. I see r8169, libphy, mdio_devres, and realtek are all loaded.

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I think I found the root cause.
In /var/log/messages, I see this:

Jul 14 14:20:39 (none) user.err kernel: r8169 0000:82:00.0: error -19: unknown chip XID 688, contact r8169 maintainers (see MAINTAINERS file)

Searching on that error takes me to this https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=438798 which leads to this https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic. ... 7#p2577017

I need some guidance on how this fix might be applied in the IFL environment....


edit - went through the KBs, but didn't find any about updating network drivers.
I downloaded r8169-6.032.00 from realtek but not sure how to add it to the image. Looking at the file it appears to be source, not binary.

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I had a USB Gigabit Ethernet adapter, so I tried that with IFL.

I can see an Ethernet device in ip a, but no IPv4 is obtained. Link lights are on, everything looks normal except no inet for enx9cebe8f8a960.

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1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: enx9cebe8f8a960: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop qlen 1000
    link/ether 9c:eb:e8:f8:a9:60 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

lsmod shows me different drivers - still Realtek, but 8153 instead of 8169

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r8153_ecm              12288  0
cdc_ether              12288  1 r8153_ecm
spi_nor                77824  0
usbnet                 24576  2 r8153_ecm,cdc_ether

No errors in dmesg:

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[    5.145756] usb 2-1: new SuperSpeed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[    5.160309] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=8153, bcdDevice=30.00
[    5.160313] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=6
[    5.160314] usb 2-1: Product: USB 10/100/1000 LAN
[    5.160315] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: Realtek
[    5.160316] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 000001000000

So why doesn't it work? Do the failure of the 8169 driver and the iwlwifi driver kill the DHCP process?
I thought about temporarily going with static IP, and searched for a KB on how to set it up. It is written for IFL 2.81, so I have no idea what, if any, is relevant with IFL 4.05. It talks about "creating IFL boot media" when I just want to make the IFL USB boot drive that I already have use static IP.

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I have a temporary workaround functioning!
I used the Configure Network option on the desktop right-click menu, and selected enx9cebe8f8a960.
There was an option to "Start enx9cebe8f8a960", so I selected it.
The interface came right up and acquired an address.

I still want to know how to fix the 8169 driver so I won't have to mess around with USB Ethernet adapters.

No idea why the boot process on-screen log shows a line like "DHCP....... [DONE]" when there is no network interface even functioning.

[TeraByte Support]

you may need to wait for the next update with newer kernel? One thing to look for is if there is any message about missing firmware.

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The release notes from realtek r8169 start with:

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release date: 2024/05/15
driver version: 6.032.00
01.Support kernel 6.1.

The first line of dmesg from IFL 405 says

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[    0.000000] Linux version 6.6.29-amd64-iflnet (root@devuan-chimaera) (gcc (Debian 10.2.1-6) 10.2.1 20210110, GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Debian) 2.35.2) #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Wed May  1 09:12:30 PDT 2024

A search on the error says "Support for XID 688 was added in Linux kernel 6.13:"

The only messages about firmware are for iwlwifi, which I'm not using.

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Studying the details of the Z890UD Motherboard, it appears the actual network chip in question is the RTL8125BG

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That hardware ID — PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8125&SUBSYS_E0001458&REV_0C — identifies a Realtek RTL8125 2.5GbE Ethernet controller, specifically the RTL8125BG variant used on Gigabyte motherboards like the Z890 UD.

| Segment | Meaning | 
| VEN_10EC | Vendor ID for Realtek Semiconductor Corp. | 
| DEV_8125 | Device ID for RTL8125 2.5GbE LAN controller | 
| SUBSYS_E0001458 | Subsystem ID for Gigabyte Technology | 
| REV_0C | Revision code — typically RTL8125BG | 

So it remains a mystery why IFL would log a message about R8169.

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Jul 14 14:20:39 (none) user.err kernel: r8169 0000:82:00.0: error -19: unknown chip XID 688, contact r8169 maintainers (see MAINTAINERS file)

This appears to be the latest firmware for the RTL8125B:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/ke ... ce77740d39
How could I see which firmware, if any, is being loaded by IFL 405?

[TeraByte Support]

that would be messages from Linux. The planned release will be 6.12.37. I guess we can look at moving to 6.15.x

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I have attached a ZIP containing all the Linux messages (dmesg, /var/log/messages, and lsmod.
I do not see any mention of firmware other than for the attempt to load iwlwifi.

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Do you have everything needed to fix this issue?

Issue seems to be 2.5 GB Eth chipset on Gigabyte Z890 is not recognized correctly.
IFL seems to think it is an RTL8169, and reports "unknown chip ID" in the log.

Looking up the chip from the hardware ID (PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8125&SUBSYS_E0001458&REV_0C) it is a Realtek RTL8125 2.5GbE Ethernet controller.

A potential solution is presented in this article: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=438798