Re: [gentoo-user] Realtek r8169 realtek.ko not loaded.

[Alexander Puchmayr]

Am Sonntag, 17. Mai 2020, 13:09:44 CEST schrieb Victor Ivanov:
> Hi Alexander,
>
> A while back I had the exact same issue with a remote machine that I am
> managing. It has an Asus B45-M mobo with an r8169 chipset. Ever since
> the 5.2.x kernel family - where it last used to work - it has been a pain.
>
> Initially I added a manual "soft" dependency in "/etc/conf.d/modules" as
> William has suggested to you with "realtek" appearing first in the list.
> But this stopped working following an update to 5.4.x and is still the
> case today with the 5.6.x family (I keep testing it once in a while).
>
> I then decided to build both realtek and r8169 modules into the kernel:
>
>     REALTEK_PHY=y
>     CONFIG_R8169=y
>

This worked, and as I found out in an answer for William's mail, it seems to 
be a problem with genkernel's way to create initrds with embedded busybox. It 
seems as if busybox does not support softdeps.

Regards
	Alex






> It did require a bit of faff as the whole chain of dependencies from
> REALTEK_PHY had to be built in as well, but I think that was about 5-6
> kernel options in total.
>
> Adding it to the ramdisk as William suggests might work too. In my case
> I didn't bother trying this due to the fact that every failed attempted
> required manual intervention by someone to get the machine booted with
> working kernel.
>
> I have a gut feeling that tells me adding it to the initrd probably
> won't work. But if you're planning on trying it, please keep us posted.
> I would be very interested in hearing your solution.
>
> Regards,
> V
>
> On 17/05/2020 09:07, Alexander Puchmayr wrote:
> > Hi there
> >
> > I just upgraded an older notebook with r8169 network chip to new kernel
> > 5.4
> > (sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-5.4.28) with genkernel.
> > After booting the new kernel the network adapter was not initialized, no
> > network interface eth0.
> > Dmesg says
> > [    6.390973] r8169 0000:08:00.0: realtek.ko not loaded, maybe it needs
> > to be added to initramfs?
> > [    6.392864] r8169: probe of 0000:08:00.0 failed with error -2
> >
> > After searching with google I found a thread in the kernel mailing list
> > https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204343
> > The cause is a soft depencency to module realtek.ko, which needs to be
> > loaded first.
> >
> > Doing this manually, i.e. rmmod r8169 && modprobe realtek && modprobe
> > r8169
> > works fine; network interface eth0 gets configured and is operating.
> >
> > Since the kernel loads the network module before systemd is running, it
> > has to be configured in initrd somehow.
> > So, the final question is, how to get that into initrd with genkernel?
> > I need to add something like this
> >
> > cat /etc/modprobe.d/realtek
> > Softdep r8169 pre: realtek
> >
> > How do I get this into initrd with genkernel-next?
> >
> > Thanks in advance
> >
> > 	Alex
> >
> > PS
> > Profile:
> > default/linux/amd64/17.0/desktop/plasma/systemd
> >
> > Relevant packages:
> > sys-apps/gentoo-systemd-integration-7
> > sys-apps/kmod-26-r5
> > sys-apps/systemd-244.3
> > sys-kernel/genkernel-next-69
> > sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-5.4.28
> >
> > Lspci
> > 08:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
> > RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 03)