Hello Aidan,
On Thu, Mar 06, 2025 at 01:23:40PM -0800, Aidan K. Wiggins via 9fans wrote:
> Hi Thierry,
>
> I too have this chip, and have been attempting to add some preliminary
> support for it in ether8169.c. I have a (WIP) patch hosted at
> http://oneiri.one/ether8169.patch. It's a bit of a mess right now. I
> have added some nominal support for other cards with the same register
> set, but have not tested these other chips, have you been able to
> tease out the exact version id for your model?
>
Thank you for the link. I will give it a look this week-end and will
go back to you during the next week. Hopefully, joining our efforts,
we should manage to get the cards working.
> Regarding hwvid masks, I encountered this too when adding support. If
> you look in the linux driver, they use a lookup table where each card
> has a specific mask (either 7c8 or 7cf). In general, they use the 7cf
> mask when they need to be more discerning about which card to match on
> (e.g. RTL8125D and ... another slightly different RTL8125D). I didn't
> want to break compatibility for older cards by outright using the more
> restrictive mask, so my change attempts to use the restrictive mask
> first, and then more lenient one if that fails.
>
>From a cursory look, there are two distinct uses: one mask to match a
macver, and another mask to select a revision, with both setting
divergent things. In our present drivers, it seems the two cases are
more or less mixed---once again: I'm just starting to discover the
whole thing, so I may be wrong.
> The drivers for these newer nics are muddied with (mostly) nameless
> registers and values to set, so it was a bit difficult figuring out
> which pieces to pull together. The BSD's also include microcode in
> lieu of firmware, which is actually the vendor driver's default. I
> found that I didn't actually need to set them in my case, but we'll
> see how it works out overtime, and with other chips.
Yes, the 8125 specially has a bunch of hard coded commands, given by
Realtek, and no explanations. This could have something to do with the
mixed support for 10Mb, 100Mb, 1Gb and 2.5Gb. But when it comes to
explanations, there are almost none...
I will get back to you after doing some work on the stuff.
--
Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ kergis +dot+ com>
http://www.kergis.com/
http://kertex.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C
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