[SOLVED] Lots of missed packets with Realtek NIC r8168/r8169

[douteiful]

Hi, I would be thankful if you could help me with this issue.

I got an ASUS N100 motherboard and it comes with a Realtek NIC, it seems this chip is problematic on Linux:

02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller [10ec:8168] (rev 15)

I initially had very slow speeds (< 100KB/s) and many rx_missed packets. I heard the r8169 driver might be problematic so I compiled the r8168 driver as per instructions here and while the speed is much better now, I still get a lot of rx_missed packets:

NIC statistics:
     tx_packets: 42042
     rx_packets: 60937
     tx_errors: 0
     rx_errors: 0
     rx_missed: 2566
     align_errors: 0
     tx_single_collisions: 0
     tx_multi_collisions: 0
     unicast: 60311
     broadcast: 151
     multicast: 475
     tx_aborted: 0
     tx_underrun: 0

This makes it drop many packets in things like Jellyfin or MediaMTX, making it useless for a Proxmox host. I also tried disabling ASPM altogether (r8168.aspm=0 r8168.eee_enable=0 pcie_aspm=off) but it doesn't fix it, I even feel it makes it worse.

I'm using PVE 8.4.5, kernel 6.8.12-12-pve. I also tried with another Realtek NIC (r8125) and Intel NIC (i226) and they work, so I don't think it's related to the rest of the system. Sadly they don't support ASPM and I'd like it because with it this motherboard uses 5 watts.

Has anyone had a similar issue or know where I could redirect this issue to?

Thanks.

 

[douteiful]

Update: For now I think I will use a spare Intel I226 card I had laying around. This card works well and it lets the CPU go down to C8 in Arch Linux, which also uses 5-5.5 watts. The problem is that with Proxmox's kernel the CPU only goes to C3... so I'll try compiling 6.15.4, which is what seems to work in Arch.

EDIT: I realized that the CPU reaches C8 just fine in Debian Bookworm as well, and I tried Debian's kernel on Proxmox (non pve) and it doesn't reach C8, so it doesn't seem to be kernel related. I'll make a new thread for this since it's unrelated.

 

[douteiful]

Just as an update: Making the Intel NIC work was a pain so trying again I manged to get the Realtek work on Debian Bookworm (it reaches C8 now though for some reason, but that's enough). I ended up just resseting BIOS factory settings.

I installed Debian 12 running 6.1.0-37-amd64 with driver r8168 8.051.02-2 first. No lost packets and C8 c-state, using around 5.5 W.
I then installed Proxmox on top and it works also fine with kernel 6.8.12-13-pve + r8168 8.054.00-1-bpo12.
So far looking good. I'll try to do clean install now with Proxmox's image - theoretically it should work.

Note: Using backports from this repo: https://github.com/nathanhi/r8168/

 

[douteiful]

Tried with a clean Proxmox install, and installed 8.054.00-1-bpo12 r8168 driver, and voilá, no packet loss and C8 power saving state, giving me a total of 5.5W power usage. I'm happy with this. I don't know what I ended up doing, but some BIOS setting might've been the culprit as it used to reach C10 before, but as long as it works I'm happy.

This motherboard is also quite buggy (PCIe port will stop working when disabling onboard Realtek, ASPM stopping working when booting from disk, etc...) so some weird behavior can be expected. And it's such a niche motheboard I doubt ASUS will look into it. Either way I'm happy with it.