Fixing RTL8111/8168B kernel module on Debian/Ubuntu

40 Responses to Fixing RTL8111/8168B kernel module on Debian/Ubuntu

1. Daniel Myall says:

   December 5, 2010 at 7:43 pm

   I used this to fix up a server with issues. If you wish to make this work with dkms so it is automatically rebuilt when the kernel is updated then:

   Make sure dkms and gcc are installed:
   apt-get install dkms gcc

   Create the file /usr/src/r8168-8.019.00/dkms.conf containing:

   *Snipped* — Look at the original post for a working example!

   Done! Now it will automatically be compiled and installed for new kernels.
2. Tim says:

   January 17, 2011 at 3:25 am

   @ Daniel : I have an issue with the DKMS method ans debian squeeze:

   root@Jupiter-Dom0:/usr/src# dkms add -m r8168 -v 8.020.00
   dkms.conf: Error! Directive ‘DEST_MODULE_LOCATION’ does not begin with
   ‘/kernel’, ‘/updates’, or ‘/extra’ in record #0.
   Error! Bad conf file.
   File: /usr/src/r8168-8.020.00/dkms.conf
   does not represent a valid dkms.conf file.

   *Snipped* — Look at the original post for a working example!

   Any idea ?
3. squarism says:

   January 23, 2011 at 12:28 am

   Awesome follow up Daniel! I was troubleshooting kernel panics while SCP’ing. Found this 8168 driver which fixed the weirdness but this dkms stuff is nice icing on the cake. I just installed some new prebuilt kernel debs from kernel.ubuntu.com and the dkms hooks fired off. Nice, never even heard of dkms. Thanks for the original post and the comment.
4. happy says:

   February 1, 2011 at 10:15 pm

   awesome. This helped me fix iscsi on Ubuntu 10.10. My motherboard used the r8169 driver, and I replaced it with the r8168 driver and followed daniel’s steps too.

   Before the update, I had terrible hangs, freeze, about 4MB/s transfer over gigabit ethernet, now with the r8169 driver I get 50MB/s over iscsi and no more freezes. no more link up/down messages. Thanks Randy and Daniel.
5. 1of16 says:

   February 22, 2011 at 1:07 pm

   Damn nice guys! Finally i found the solution for my dell vostro v130!

   btw. there is a never driver. check the realtek website.
6. Randy says:

   February 22, 2011 at 1:44 pm

   @1of16

   Yes, I know there’s a newer driver but this one works perfectly and their heavy javascript crap doesn’t work with wget or any other command line grabber. Otherwise I would have linked directly.
7. 1of16 says:

   February 22, 2011 at 2:45 pm

   @Randy
   ok 🙂

   @Tim
   replace the ” with ‘ and it will work 🙂
8. Randy says:

   February 22, 2011 at 3:10 pm

   @1to16 and @Daniel

   I re-posted the DKMS stuf in code blocks on the original article to fix the charset issues make dkms.conf creation easier.
9. Edward says:

   March 2, 2011 at 9:26 am

   when i update the kernel today the r8168 module was not automatically rebuild and install to the new kernel. The new kernel still load the r8169 module.

   I am currently running Ubuntu 10.10 (64bit) and r8168 v8.021.00

   Please help.
10. 1of16 says:

    March 3, 2011 at 4:09 am

    You followed all the instructions and blacklisted the driver?
    you took a look at your logfiles?
    I got some problems myself, but only cause I played with both drivers versions and dkms didn’t know what to do 😉 so i removed the drivers, only added the newest and reinstalled the kernel. now its working fine!
11. SQUARISM » Arduino Cat Faucet with Mongodb and Rails

    March 10, 2011 at 12:00 am

    […] solution worked. It’s pretty lengthy and I’ll save it for another post. There’s some stuff on the web about it. Basically you use dkms to build a module that supposed to be updated everytime […]

12. Juan Sierra Pons says:

    March 19, 2011 at 3:04 pm

    It works like a charm!

    The only thing I have to modify was to adapt the makefile to the debian way:

    KDIR := /usr/src/linux-headers-$(KVER)/

    http://bernaerts.dyndns.org/linux/49-debian-server-rtl8111

    Thank you for sharing your knowledge and time

    Best regards!

    Juan Sierra Pons
13. bandroidx says:

    April 28, 2011 at 7:42 pm

    installed natty on my brand new sandy bridge machine and was getting epic frame drops, awesome awesome awesome! you are the man.
14. bandroidx says:

    April 28, 2011 at 10:34 pm

    i forgot to mention, my newer motherboard (H61) required the newer driver, you might want to update your download for that reason. With your posted driver I got a “chip not identified” or something when modprobing the driver. Once i updated it worked.
15. Terry says:

    July 18, 2011 at 11:42 pm

    Thanks for this – I was experiencing crashes with the r8169 module in recent kernel builds, using Realtek’s driver seems to have resolved the problems.
16. liori says:

    July 23, 2011 at 11:09 am

    Success report: Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 works after applying those instructions, with minor remark: 8.019.00 doesn’t work, I got the newest one (8.024.00).
17. Chris says:

    February 3, 2012 at 6:08 am

    FYI – with the newest 8.027.00 version of the driver, I had to change the dkms.conf slightly:

    MAKE[0]="'make'"

    That is, the command in double-quotes is ‘make’ with the single quotes. Doing this causes dkms to avoid sending the KERNELRELEASE argument to make. The r8168 Makefile tries to do something special if KERNELRELEASE is set, but it doesn’t work. Suppressing it made everything work fine for me.
18. Zrin says:

    March 21, 2012 at 5:50 am

    The current version of the driver from Realtek (8.028.00) has a buggy src/Makefile, it has to be corrected in orther to compile with dkms:

    …
    ifneq ($(KERNELRELEASE),)
BASEDIR := /lib/modules/$(KERNELRELEASE)
else
BASEDIR := /lib/modules/$(shell uname -r)
endif

    … (remove endif at the end of the file)
19. Tomek says:

    April 4, 2012 at 9:06 am

    All of this is not required anymore for Kubuntu 11.10 and r8168-8.029.00.tar.bz2 driver. All you have to do is this (tested on the fresh copy of the system):

    sudo -s
    apt-get install make gcc
    tar xvjf r8168-8.029.00.tar.bz2
    cd r8168-8.029.00/
    ./autorun.sh

    that is it, than you can check

    lspci -v | grep r8
    Kernel driver in use: r8168
    Kernel modules: r8168

    And the net works fine!
20. Bughunter says:

    April 17, 2012 at 4:52 am

    Is this still a problem with current kernels used by squeeze in 2012-04 ? Thanks!
    1. Randy says:

       April 17, 2012 at 6:08 pm

       No idea. Installing these drivers is just habit for me, don’t want to risk it unless there’s evidence it’s solved.
21. Carlos says:

    April 20, 2012 at 8:23 am

    Yes, the issue is still present in squeeze (kernel 2.6.32)
22. alberto says:

    April 24, 2012 at 9:54 am

    Well, im using latest debian testing (using 0.29.00), and even tho it does not drops packages, once the link of the eth0 goes down is very hard to bring it back without rebooting… Just my 2cents
23. alberto says:

    April 24, 2012 at 9:55 am

    the problem comes with the kernel version of the driver. I just installed the one from realteak to check how it goes
24. Jacco says:

    April 28, 2012 at 8:11 am

    Just upgraded from Ubuntu 11.10 (fully patched) to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (which appeared 2 days ago). With Ubuntu 11.10 I used the Realtek-provided driver r8168.
    After upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04 the problem seems to be gone: my onboard rtl8111/8168B still triggers the rtl8169 driver (kernel provided) to be loaded, but now it works like a charm. No hickups anymore, and scp-speed (using arcfour cipher) is > 50 MB/sec.
    Nice! And it was about time!
25. Marcello says:

    July 31, 2012 at 9:20 am

    Hi, thanks for the useful information.
    Unfortunately I cannot bring up eth0 after installing r8168 with the dkms method described. The driver compiles and installs fine, I have blacklisted r8169 and rebooted, and r8168 loads automatically just fine.
    BUT, the ethernet interface doesn’t appear.
    I also removed /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules which then was recreated upon reboot, but that didn’t help either.

    BTW, my card is a D-Link System Inc DGE-528T Gigabit Ethernet Adapter (rev 10)

    If I do a lspci -v, I still read Kernel modules: r8169
26. Marcello says:

    July 31, 2012 at 9:20 am

    Forgot to mention, I’m on debian squeeze.
27. Romain says:

    September 17, 2012 at 7:26 am

    Many thanks to the author of this article, he saved my life.

    What happened:
    – installed Debian Squeeze on a brand new computer.
    – no problem for one week.
    – installed Windows 7 on another partition.
    – problems began just after : “r8169 0000:03:00.0: eth0: link up” every few seconds in logs.
    – tried the following : reboot, power off, install firmware-realtek firmware-linux-nonfree, rebuild ramfs. None did work.
    – following this blog, I installed driver Realtek 8.019. It did not detecte my card.
    – I downloaded the latest driver : Realtek 8.0.32. Now, it works perfectly.

    Thanks, once again.
    1. Randy says:

       September 17, 2012 at 11:31 am

       Can you confirm all the install steps are the same for new driver except the version numbers? If so, please email me the driver tarball used and I’ll update the original post (amps@djlab.com). I have issues with the RT website and have a hard time downloading the drivers.
28. Romain says:

    September 24, 2012 at 5:29 am

    Randy,

    Sorry, I did not see your answer until now.

    The only thing I changed beside the release version is the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-network file name that has been renamed to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-network.conf to prevent warning from Debian modprobe.

    I sent the archive at randy at djlab.com. Hope it works.
29. Randy says:

    September 24, 2012 at 9:05 am

    Got it, and I updated the post with the newer version number and modprobe.d filename. If anyone has issues let me know.
30. Jan Schnackenberg says:

    November 4, 2012 at 3:23 pm

    Oh lord… Thank you Chris for the "'make'" hint…

    I’ve tried to get this to work for months and just now I’m stumbling across this.
31. Flittermice says:

    December 10, 2012 at 5:52 pm

    Thanks for posting this info plus the ‘make’ hint (not knowing this made really big trouble…)
    I can confirm that this works for driver version r8168-8.034.00 as well!
32. noel ikalina says:

    February 8, 2013 at 12:05 am

    I need help for this erorr message please!
    foodmansilaysvr@foodmansilaysvr-System-Product-Name:/usr/src/r8168-8.032.00$ depmod -a
    FATAL: Could not open /lib/modules/2.6.38-16-generic/modules.dep.temp for writing: Permission denied
33. Alt0160 says:

    June 11, 2013 at 3:15 pm

    With 036 drivers you may get and error about RxChkS1um undefined… just open the file /usr/src/r8168-8.036.00/src/r8168_n.c and replace RxChkS1um with RxChkSum.

    BTW it seems that on my computer each kernel update is a “do it again daaaaddy” even using the dkms trick. Must be missing something but i dunno what (skill, intelligence….).
34. Serg says:

    July 1, 2013 at 6:52 am

    Good job. Works on Ubuntu server 12.04 with 8.036.00 and dkms.
35. Cannot Get Realtek R8168 Ethernet Card Up | Click & Find Answer !

    March 2, 2014 at 5:48 am

    […] If you have problems with the kernel not even loading the correct module = drivers for RealTek 8168, this may provide necessary insight (ie. hardware detection problem):http://djlab.com/2010/10/fixing-rtl8111-8168b-driver-debian-ubuntu/ […]

36. Treiberprobleme mit RTL8111/8168B bei Debian/Ubuntu beheben | /dev/info

    November 3, 2014 at 4:45 pm

    […] Der bei Debian/Ubuntu mitgelieferte Treiber “r8169″ ist in Kombination mit der Realtek RTL8111/8168B ein Muster an Unzuverlässigkeit. Die Lösung des Problems fand sich schließlich in Randy’s Blog […]

37. How do I stop my ethernet network connection from dropping? | Some Ubuntu Questions and Answers

    January 28, 2015 at 10:14 am

    […] DKMS […]

38. Michael says:

    May 12, 2015 at 3:49 am

    worked fine with 8.0039

    did your guide on debian wheezy:

    root@storageSB:~# ethtool -i eth0
    driver: r8168
    version: 8.039.00-NAPI
    firmware-version:
    bus-info: 0000:03:00.0
    supports-statistics: yes
    supports-test: no
    supports-eeprom-access: no
    supports-register-dump: yes
    supports-priv-flags: no