RealTek vs Intel ethernet on OpenBSD

Back to OpenBSD.

My experience may be entirely anecdotal, but I’ve had good luck with Intel networking hardware on both Linux and BSDs.

That anecdotal experience has come true once again.

The little fanless minicomputer on the top in the image above has a pair of RealTek ethernet ports (using the re(4) drivers as re0 and re1). They worked fine for years under Linux (and still do). They also worked fine for a couple weeks under OpenBSD 7.8 until one morning, they didn’t. The interface was up, but DHCP simply wouldn’t acquire an IP address from upstream. Maddening. Sure enough, there are a handful of other people who have experienced the same problem.

There’s really no sane way to add hardware to this Mini-ITX (120mm square) board and I sure has heck am not trusting my entire network to flow through a USB3 dongle or something like that, so I simply bought a whole new computer.

The larger fanless minicomputer below the other one has Intel ethernet hardware (and use the em(4) drivers as em0 and em1). Sure enough, they worked perfectly out of the box. Thankfully, this computer only cost $60 used on Ebay.

(Side note: I love these fanless "industrial controller" computers. They have weird hardware - often in the form of tons of serial "COM" ports, but they are generally very reliable solid-state machines that just sit and work for years on end and are often inexpensive used.)

I’m glad I had already spent the time to turn the configuration for this device into a repo so re-implementing on the new hardware took a fraction of the time.

Note: This is the same computer involved in this other driver issue (ironically, Intel related): OpenBSD Blog #11: Disabling Direct Rendering Manager on OpenBSD.