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List:       freebsd-hackers
Subject:    Re: Motherboards for Ryzen 9
From:       Stefan Esser <se () FreeBSD ! org>
Date:       2023-11-13 9:19:05
Message-ID: df039fb8-dcbf-48ab-a139-9403d5e8bbf0 () FreeBSD ! org
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Am 13.11.23 um 00:22 schrieb Greg 'groggy' Lehey:
> On Sunday, 12 November 2023 at 13:49:49 +0100, Paul Floyd wrote:
>> On 12-11-23 11:35, Daniel Engberg wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sunday, 12 November 2023 at  9:46:18 +0100, Paul Floyd wrote:
>>>>
>>>> MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk
>>>
>>> The MSI board looks decent I guess, the x16/x4/x2 layout isn't great but
>>> it's not horrible either depending on your use case. Never looked into
>>> their lineup due to lack of a decent builtin NIC. You can get a separate
>>> one but it's still an additional cost and takes of at least one PCIe slot.
> 
> FWIW, I've just got a machine with this motherboard.  It seemed the
> best option available to me at the time, and I haven't had any issues
> with it.  Yes, the silly NIC (where do you find 2.5 Gb/s hubs?) is
> irritating, but I need 2 NICs anyway, so putting in a second wasn't an
> issue.  I also couldn't find any motherboard that fitted the other
> requirements and didn't have this NIC.

Hi Greg,

the 2.5 Gbit/s NIC is downwards compatible with 1 Gbit/s Ethernet
and while there is not much supporting equipment, it is no worse
than a 1 Gbit/s NIC in practice.

10 Gbit/s is too expensive (due to chip and board complexities)
and to power-hungry for integration on typical PC mainboards
(given the high cost of 10 Gbit/s switches, hardly anybody could
make good use of them outside a datacenter environment, anyway).

You do probably know that the Realtek RTL8125 chip is supported
by the official Realtek driver in ports (realtek-re-kmod package).

Too bad that Realtek does not publish programming information for
this chip. There are open source drivers that support it, but they
do not fit well into FreeBSD and they do not provide sufficient
information to make the FreeBSD Realtek 1 Gbit/s NIT driver support
the 2.5 Gbit/s chip ... (I had started a merge of the code for the
new chip into our kernel driver, but there was not enough information
about the PHY and other details and I gave up.)

Every few month I look for a publicly available databook with the
necessary details (full register description, reset sequence etc.)
for the RTL8125 chips on the sites that tend to provide such
information, but nothing has appeared there, yet.

Best regards, STefan

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