Bug 8449

Summary: Large delay in activating network for RTL8111
Product: Mageia Reporter: Frank Griffin <ftg>
Component: InstallerAssignee: Mageia Bug Squad <bugsquad>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: Normal CC: cjw, thierry.vignaud, tmb
Version: CauldronKeywords: NEEDINFO
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: x86_64   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Source RPM: drakx-installer-binaries CVE:
Status comment:
Attachments: reprot.bug.gz using the RTL8111 NIC

Description Frank Griffin 2012-12-20 18:04:55 CET
I'm doing a fresh network install on a box with an onboard RTL8111 NIC.

After selecting HTTP and getting to the point where I would expect to see "Bringing Network Up", that doesn't appear.  The screen stays black for a minute or more, and then suddenly I get the "Bringing Network Up" and everything proceeds fine.

I repeated the test, but with a PCI-E NIC card mounted, and I get "Bringing Network Up" almost immediately.

I'll attach report.bug.
Comment 1 Frank Griffin 2012-12-20 18:05:46 CET
Created attachment 3263 [details]
reprot.bug.gz using the RTL8111 NIC
Comment 2 Thierry Vignaud 2012-12-21 08:48:11 CET
Maybe firmware loading.
The following message appears one minute after loading previous modules
"unable to load firmware patch rtl_nic/rtl8168e-3.fw (-2)"

Did you use boot-nonfree.iso or boot.iso?

CC: (none) => thierry.vignaud, tmb
Source RPM: (none) => drakx-installer-binaries

Comment 3 Frank Griffin 2012-12-21 12:38:22 CET
I used boot.iso.  

But I don't understand two things:

1) Why it eventually works just fine without firmware anyway.
2) Why it takes a minute to decide it can't find firmware.
Comment 4 Thierry Vignaud 2012-12-21 13:20:27 CET
1) maybe only some features needs a firmware
2) a timeout
Comment 5 Frank Griffin 2012-12-21 13:30:49 CET
(In reply to comment #4)
> 1) maybe only some features needs a firmware
> 2) a timeout

Yeah, but in either case, either the package is there or it isn't.  If it isn't, it isn't going to magically appear because you wait for a minute.
Comment 6 Thierry Vignaud 2012-12-21 13:40:35 CET
Indeed.
Anyway does boot-nonfree.iso works better?
Comment 7 Frank Griffin 2012-12-21 13:42:19 CET
I'll try that today.
Comment 8 Frank Griffin 2012-12-21 15:57:14 CET
With boot-nonfree, both NICs bring up the network immediately.  Trying again with boot.iso, the onboard NIC still gets the delay, but the card is fine.

The interesting thing is that these are the same NICs from bug#8451, which are supposed to be identical.
Comment 9 Thierry Vignaud 2012-12-21 16:07:17 CET
You could try removing /sbin/hotplug and /hotplug from all.rdz in order to see if it's it that causes the timeout issue

MGA_PATH=/mageia/unstable/x86_64/isolinux/alt0
mkdir T
cd T
xzcat $MGA_PATH/all.rdz|cpio -id
rm -f hotplug sbin/hotplug 
cp $MGA_PATH/all.rdz{,.sav}
find| cpio -o -c --quiet| xz --check=crc32 --lzma2=dict=512KiB>$MGA_PATH/all.rdz
Comment 10 Thierry Vignaud 2012-12-21 16:08:51 CET
Anyway, I think I'll just remove our hotplug since kernel now autoloads firmware.
Comment 11 Thierry Vignaud 2012-12-21 16:20:57 CET
Thomas: no complaint against this?
Comment 12 Christiaan Welvaart 2012-12-21 17:10:53 CET
There are likely different versions of these chips, lspci says 8168B while the firmware files are for 8168d,e,f,g - so maybe the driver does not load a firmware file for some versions. For example I have "b" and "e" chips (plus a 8110s) while you have "b" and "evl" versions (according to the driver's dmesg output).

CC: (none) => cjw

Comment 13 Frank Griffin 2012-12-21 19:14:15 CET
>There are likely different versions of these chips

Makes sense.  But it still doesn't explain why it takes the code 60 seconds or more to figure out the firmware package isn't there and move on.
Comment 14 Thierry Vignaud 2014-05-18 12:09:11 CEST
Does it works better with mga4 with regular boot.iso?
We now rely on kernel for loading firmware.

Keywords: (none) => NEEDINFO

Comment 15 Dick Gevers 2014-11-21 14:06:59 CET
@ftg@roadrunner.com: ping?

This was reported against an older installer, no longer current.

Please revert to #c14 from tv, but bearing in mind to base a reply on M5beta1

If okay please close. If not please advise, remove the 'NEEDINFO' and set whiteboard as '5beta1' (or higher) . Thanks!
Comment 16 Frank Griffin 2015-05-20 14:23:48 CEST
I'm closing this.  Looking at harddrake2 on the affected box, it shows as an NC100 Network Everywhere Fast Ethernet 10/100; it's the PCI-E card that is the RTL8111 Gigabit.  Since I've upgraded the rest of my network to gigabit, I've disabled the NC100 in the BIOS, so this is really no longer an issue.

Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => FIXED