Proxmox VE 8.3.1 Installation with no RTL8125 Drivers

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jhoggood

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Feb 12, 2025
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I'm trying to install Proxmox 8.3.1 (latest) on a newer ASUS Z890 motherboard that uses the Realtek R8125 2.5Ge NIC and it's failing to get network connectivity. That PC has only the RTL8125 NIC thus I have no other options to get initial Internet connectivity. Proxmox 8.3.1 doesn't detect this NIC and install a driver nor does the latest Realtek 2.5Gbe driver kit (r8125-9.015.00.tar.bz2) procedure (via autorun.sh) work correctly as the make fails with the error below.

Check old driver and unload it
rmmod r8169
./autorun.sh: 31: make: not found

This of course would require I then manually find all the required compiler/binutils, etc. packages myself just to be able to install the driver which seems like a lot of work for a problem that could be resolved by having a simpler automated driver injection method during PVE install.

Any suggestions for a simpler way to simply install PVE 8.3.1?
 
Thanks for the response. This Realtek RT8125 2.5Ge NIC is a very popular NIC on newer Intel and AMD motherboards so I would rather see Proxmox development provide a fix rather than masking the problem going to another NIC. I purposely bought this ASUS Z890 Pro Wifi motherboard for this 2.5Ge capability.
 
You are correct in that Ubuntu 24.04.2 also does not recognize/load the RTL8125 driver as I confirmed last week. I was able though to manually install the driver via the Realtek public site provided script (https://www.realtek.com/Download/List?cate_id=584) I mentioned above which PVE 8.3.1 will NOT allow me to do as there are missing build/make components in the base PVE 8.3.1 deployment (see my comments above).

If PVE 8.3.1 provided the required gcc, build, make, etc. compiler tools on a clean install, similar to Ubuntu 24.04.2, then I could easily install the driver thus my ask to the PVE development team.
 
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jhoggood said:
If PVE 8.3.1 provided the required gcc, build, make, etc. compiler tools on a clean install, similar to Ubuntu 24.04.2,
Click to expand...

Without running an Ubuntu installation to verify, I’m fairly certain that the default install does not include the dev-tools package. The vast majority of users doesn't need them. You may have downloaded a DVD version that includes these packages and selected "dev-tools" during installation.

Of course, you can always add these packages manually, even to a minimal install, but that would require a network connection.

Keep in mind that PVE is not a workstation-oriented product like standard Ubuntu. It’s designed to be lean, so it’s unlikely to include extra packages that don’t benefit most users. Unnecessary packages also increase the security vulnerability footprint and maintenance overhead.

That said, your request might catch the attention of someone from the Proxmox team, and they could take action if they see a broader need for it.

Cheers!

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox
 
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Is it the 8125 or the 8152? I have several USB Realtek 8152 NICs and they always just worked for me in Proxmox.
 
The RTL8125 may be supported by Linux 6.8 but there seem to exist a RTL8125B and RTL8125BG variants (see Realtek Download Page)
Most likely these variants are newer and not supported in 6.8 - you could try if the newest Ubuntu 25.04 daily build supports your NIC.
There is an optional 6.11 Kernel for Proxmox which may support it but unfortunately you cant install it without network / internet.

Compiling a driver is a mess and there is no guarantee the driver will be stable, after kernel updates you may even loose connectivity and have to recompile the driver - thats something you absolutely want to avoid on a hypervisor, even in a home lab

As bbgeek17 already suggested - your best option is another NIC that is supported by the proxmox kernel out of the box
 
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Ubuntu 24.04.2 (current stable) DOES support the RTL8125 2.5Ge via the Realtek driver download/build/install (autorun.sh) above. Ubuntu 24.04.2 is where I started but wanted more capabilities that Proxmox offers and an ability to showcase Proxmox for clients too down the road.

Driver updates/insertions are something many of us have dealt with from early MS Windows to Linux to VMware vSphere over the last 30+ years. I'm still unclear as to why most ISV's don't recognize that new/old driver add/update/delete in any product is a normal thing as the HW landscape changes all the time.

Any software product, even Type-1 hypervisors, should have a solid user interface to integrate new video, network, etc. drivers at installation or even post-installation time. It ought to be part of the graphical and/or terminal based installation wizards up to and including on Linux vs. Windows a driver build if required as you can't rely on Internet connectivity at installation time at least. The cost vs. risk doesn't doesn't justify not including build tools in my experience as you might even need them as an ISV support organization one day to hotfix/patch something that requires a rebuild for a support contract g customer. I like what I see in Proxmox after using many hypervisors for years so would love to see the development team add such a capability.

In the meantime, it's back to Ubuntu 24.04.2 it seems as I won't be a/ buying another NIC when I have a perfectly good 2.5Gbe one, 2/ manually cobbling together all package dependencies in order to build/install the RTL8125 driver on PVE. You are 100% correct, the future upgrade risk in doing that is prohibitive. Thanks again MarkusKO for your help.

Here's the driver and PCI device info:

Driver: 2.5G Ethernet LINUX driver r8125 for kernel up to 6.12 9.015.00 2025/02/27 110 K
lsipci: RTL8125 2.5GbE Controller (rev 0C)
 
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jhoggood said:
Any software product, even Type-1 hypervisors, should have a solid user interface to integrate new video, network, etc. drivers at installation or even post-installation time.
Click to expand...
Debian (and Ubuntu) have a thing called DKMS to semi-automate the process, including upgrades. Vendors need to support it though, it can't work with random vendor-provided scripts.

Also, there are still occasional issues that you have with any out-of-tree drivers, namely that the kernel developers don't care about keeping internal kernel interfaces stable (as opposed to user-space interfaces which are almost sacred). They have good reason to believe that doing so would bloat the kernel and impede progress (see Windows for an example).

Because of that it often happens that drivers won't build against a newer kernel and they also need to be updated. There's ways to automate that too, but hardly any vendors bother, probably because the ones who would bother instead just upstream their driver into the kernel code base.

My point being that if a vendor can't even be bothered to support DKMS, you might want to take them off your list if you intend to run any kind of Linux.
 
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BobhWasatch said:
My point being that if a vendor can't even be bothered to support DKMS, you might want to take them off your list if you intend to run any kind of Linux.
Click to expand...
but what about that contract support customer who bought an Asus gaming laptop to run their critical production on the state-of-the-art 2.5 gigabit network. They require on-the-fly kernel hot-patches every other month, and constantly download and compile random code from the internet. Of course, they examine every line to ensure it's not introducing backdoors.
 
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the other RTL8125 nic variants are supported but only on newer kernel versions, i think i read someting about kernel version 6.13 or newer on some random internet post
 
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