Asus Prime Z270-P, LAN killed by PCI-e cards - SOLVED

[mggb]

Hi
I recently bought a packaged i7 7770K, + RAM and the above MB
Running Stretch on it, but this problem is not restricted to it.

Everything works fine until you install a PCI-e card.
The next boot the onboard Realtek r8168/8111 nic does not work. The chip is recognised, wlan0 is renamed to whatever, but the r8169 firmware is never loaded and no LAN.
Whatever PCI-e card you insert works, unless it happens to be an ethernet card with r8168 chipset and you insert a second PCI-e card, which knocks the LAN out on the expansion card too!

This happens on Stretch, Buster, Jessie and Ubuntu 17.10.
(It also happened with windoze 8, the only version I have on a partition.)

MB duff you would think? Wrong, I obtained a second new one and same happened again.

I have built the r8168-dkms driver in Ubuntu as a trial, this works when there are no PCI-e cards and fails when there are, just the same as the r8169 one.

Anyone had similar experience?
I am guessing at some sort of incompatibility with the Z270 chipset, but no idea what.
Hoping it is with the realtek driver specifically.

Will hopefully obtain an Intel chipset LAN card shortly and see what happens to that when another card is inserted.

regards

[mggb]

After many hours I have now solved this issue.

It is all down to the horrible Realtek r8168/8111 NIC and the flaky r8169 module loaded by default on so many distros.

I switched to Debian Buster, because I am trialing package builds there anyway for another project, and updated the 4.14.02 kernel and headers.

Downloaded the latest Realtek r8168 source code from here http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/dow ... wnTypeID=3

Built against the 4.14.02 kernel, installed and re-booted.

Not immediate success, because the name which eth0 was renamed to had changed, but edited the wicd configuration to the new name and the following in a terminal brought the required result.

Code: Select all

root@INTEL-i7:/# lspci -k
05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)
    Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
    Kernel driver in use: r8168
    Kernel modules: r8168

root@INTEL-i7:/# ifconfig
lo: flags=73<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING>  mtu 65536
        inet 127.0.0.1  netmask 255.0.0.0
        inet6 ::1  prefixlen 128  scopeid 0x10<host>
        loop  txqueuelen 1000  (Local Loopback)
        RX packets 8  bytes 480 (480.0 B)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 8  bytes 480 (480.0 B)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

root@INTEL-i7:/# ip a
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default 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
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: enp5s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether b0:6e:bf:2e:cc:c5 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

root@INTEL-i7:/# ip link set enp5s0 up

root@INTEL-i7:/# ifconfig
enp5s0: flags=4099<UP,BROADCAST,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        ether b0:6e:bf:2e:cc:c5  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0
        device interrupt 122  base 0xe000  

lo: flags=73<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING>  mtu 65536
        inet 127.0.0.1  netmask 255.0.0.0
        inet6 ::1  prefixlen 128  scopeid 0x10<host>
        loop  txqueuelen 1000  (Local Loopback)
        RX packets 8  bytes 480 (480.0 B)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 8  bytes 480 (480.0 B)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

root@INTEL-i7:/# ping 192.168.1.1
PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.483 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.400 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.385 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.395 ms
^C
--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3056ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.385/0.415/0.483/0.046 ms

Hooray, is all I can say, now I can use my graphics card etc without knocking out the LAN.