RTL8153 Compile

stormi

@olivierlambert up to XCP-ng 8.1 we had the installer for management agent in a client_install directory on the ISO as in Citrix Hypervisor installation ISOs.

jokurinopoloski

HOLY MOLY! I think I fixed it by disabling TCP offloading according to this article:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/pvdrivers-troubleshooting.html#citrix-tcp-offloading

Internet works without ssl/tls errors! I'm going to check right away if I can get the 2.5Gbit speeds!

EDIT: As of now I get 1.70 Gbits/sec with an Iperf3 test, this is amazing! Not getting the full speed is probably because of VM overhead or the cat5E cables who aren't that shiny anymore.

I want to thank you all for taking the time to help! It must be a pain sometimes! Especially people who revive old threads. BUT I can finally follow my VirtualMachine dreams I had planned for a long time. You guys are amazing, I've been using Xcp-NG for a year and there will be many more years to come!

Merry Christmas! And I hope this thread will help a lot more xcp-ng fans!

olivierlambert

Nice I think we might document this in our doc, maybe in the troubleshooting section!

stormi

@olivierlambert said in RTL8153 Compile:

Nice I think we might document this in our doc, maybe in the troubleshooting section!

Agreed. @jokurinopoloski, could you try to contribute something to the https://xcp-ng.org/docs/troubleshooting.html page? ("Help us to improve this page!" link at the bottom)

jokurinopoloski

@stormi I will try and look into that tomorrow! Thanks guys

olivierlambert

That would be wonderful and also helpful for other people having the same issue

jokurinopoloski

@olivierlambert Created a pull request on this matter, I hope it's properly described.

olivierlambert

@jokurinopoloski I reviewed your PR!

Thanks for the contribution

FilHarr

Apologies for the bump of an old topic, but is anyone aware of the existence of an updated r8152 driver that will support the r8156 (2.5gbe) chipset within xcp-ng?

I can download the driver source from realtek directly, but am not 100% on how to compile it and then have xcp-ng use it in preference to the existing driver.

olivierlambert

A topic for @Andrew I think ^^

Andrew

@FilHarr @olivierlambert Sure, I'll give it a go.
I have a USB r8153 and r8156 adapter on the way for testing.

Andrew

@FilHarr The new realtek driver builds and loads.... I'll give it a try this weekend when my new USB adapter arrives.

FilHarr

@Andrew That sounds encouraging! Happy to help out by doing some testing if that's a) possible and b) would assist.

Andrew

@FilHarr I have the driver built and working, but I have a USB naming problem that is not safely resolved by the previous workaround method so I have not finished testing. Looks like they will be adding the new 5Gb NICs soon.

FilHarr

@Andrew I eventually managed to get v2.17.1 of the realtek driver compiled and loaded. I have an RTL8153 and an RTL8156 based USB adapter connected to my host device which are both being correctly identified (took me a while to work out how to get the updated kernel module to load on boot but figured it out in the end). Have added both networks to a VM and everything seems to be working ok (transfer speeds are as expected).

What is the issue you're seeing with the USB naming? I already had the RTL8153 USB working with the default driver and a rename rule in '70-persistent-net.rules'. Added a similar rule for the RTL8156 USB and both renames seem to be surviving reboots with the updated 2.17.1 driver.

etomm

@FilHarr and @Andrew instead I had the driver compiled and loading. I am setting my USB 2.5 device with echo 1 > /sys/bus/usb/devices/2-5/bConfigurationValue to use r8152 but it stays always disconnected

Andrew

@FilHarr The USB renaming rule works if I have one USB adapter... so I guess it's good enough for now.

etomm

@Andrew but just to understand: did you do something else apart recompiling the r8152 project?

Andrew

@etomm For the code I compiled it mostly as-it (with one change to support the different XCP kernel header version). I also added three udev rule changes. One is included with the driver code. One change to stop XCP scripts changing USB ethernet names. And one that is to support static USB ethernet names and rename unknown USB ethernet devices to protect the system from conflicts.

I now have it working correctly with multiple USB ethernet adapters and stabled names that don't interfere with regular ethernet adapters. It still requires manually adding the MAC addresses and ethernet device names because XCP/Xen does not support USB ethernet devices.

etomm

@Andrew but I suppose that even without the udev rules, the device was still working with just the code compilation. I made it compile too, changing just a #if definition that was looking for kernel source version < 4.19.10 and mine is 4.19.0 but existing and was conflicting. Was there another code modification?