From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Realtek Ethernet Adapter
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Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 11:23:51 -0400
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On Sat Jun 16 04:01:25 EDT 2001, wstan@localhostnl.demon.nl wrote:
> I am aware of the hardware specifications page for
> Plan9, however, I bought an unsupported, cheap Realtek
> chip based ethernet adapter. Will it work with Plan9 without
> any special modifications?
> 
> I am not using it right now as I am awaiting the
> installation of my ADSL service (next week), so
> there is now way to test it. It does install with
> linux 2.2 though.
> 
> The chip is the RTL8139C. Here is a link to a
> page with the specs:
> 
> http://www.realtek.com.tw/htm/products/cn/rtl8139c.htm
> 
> -- 
> Bill                             William Staniewicz
>                                  Amsterdam, NL

On May 8th in 9fans I wrote:
>On Tue May  8 04:37:27 EDT 2001, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>> ...
>> The on-board ethernet chip is a Realtek 8319; is that supported?  If not,
>> I have 3com PCMCIA card that ought to work, but it'd be nice to use the one
>> that's on board.
>> ...
>
>Do you mean the Realtek RTL8139? If so, there is no driver but I did start
>to write one a while ago. However, the datasheet and programming guide are a bit
>of a joke and I looked at both the Linux and FreeBSD drivers only to find they
>both had lots of comments and workarounds for chip bugs; the disturbing thing
>was that the bug sets handled by the two drivers didn't seem to intersect much.

That still stands as far as I know. I've given my prototype driver to a couple
of people who expressed interest in getting it working but haven't had any feedback.
It's not much of a driver but at least would save you typing in all the enums if
you were interested; I have a suitable card for testing against somewhere.

--jim