Biostar TH61 mini-ITX motherboard and LAN
#1
Anyone have a Biostar TH61 mini-ITX motherboard? I just got mine last night, and I'm migrating from a Zotac GF9300 ITX motherboard.

In Windows7 it works fine, but I've tried Openelec and XBMCFreak's Eden Beta build and it seems that the LAN/Ethernet driver is very flaky. The LAN PHY is listed as Realtek RTL8111E - 10/100/1000 Controller, so it should be working just fine, correct? The adapter picks up a DHCP address pretty easily but network transfers are very hit and miss. Sometimes they work, sometimes not, and on large transfers it's like it's choking after a bit.

I installed ethtool, and it's reporting that everything seems to be working and that the adapter is autonegotiating at 1000Mb/FD as it should be. Just wondering if anyone else has seen this.
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#2
Well, I kind of have it figured out. I did some searching and found that the culprit is the r8169 driver. Apparently, it really doesn't work all that well. The fix is to download the Realtek 8168 driver, compile it, blacklist 8169, and then set Linux to use 8168.

Well, since install CDs want to use 8169, I'm kind of in a pickle. Since 8169 is so bad, whenever the install CD tries to download needed packages it usually times out. So, I installed the Karmic/Dharma Live-CD. That worked and I was able to get 8168 compiled and running cleanly.

The new issue is, Karmic/Dharma doesn't have the necessary software and kernel modules to really allow for utilization of the Sandy Bridge IGP. I'm kind of stuck on how to work around that now. I've tried installing the Eden beta by adding the unstable repository. It installed just fine, but the GUI is damn near unusable due to sluggishness from lack of drivers that allow for hardware acceleration of OpenGL.
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#3
I expect you may have sorted the problem by now. This was the first post I found when I googled the problem.

Just in case anyone else is having the same issue and stumbles on this thread then this is how I fixed it.

I installed windows 7 and then XBMC Live Beta3. The network was working fine on windows 7 but very slow and problematic in XBMC. After reading the second post above it gave me more information to search for. After a bit of searching I found some information that i have slightly modified to make it a little less cryptic.

# download driver for r8168, and unpack
http://www.realtek.com/downloads/downloa...Down=false

I copied the extracted folder to /tmp/

# Make a note of the details from the following command and replace the instances of 'uname -r' with the output.
uname -r

# go to driver location
cd /tmp/r8168-8.028.00/
sudo rmmod r8169
sudo mv /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/r8169.ko ~/r8169.ko.backup
make clean modules
sudo make install
sudo depmod -a
sudo insmod ./src/r8168.ko
sudo mv /initrd.img ~/initrd.img.backup
sudo mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-`uname -r` `uname -r`
sudo echo "r8168" >> sudo /etc/modules
lspci -v
sudo reboot

Once I had finished this the network was nice and speedy again in XBMC Live.

Regards

Dingo
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#4
It's fine with the XBMCbuntu installs since it doesn't have to download anything to install. When you're installing via a minimal install disk it downloads packages as needed during the installation process. This is a problem because with bad drivers, the downloading part doesn't work so well. Once the install completes, driver compilation and replacement is easy.

I was lucky in that when I tried the minimal install a second time, the network was stable enough during the install to complete. I then replaced the driver and everything was peachy. I've also got a sandboxed XBMCbuntu (Beta3) installation on a removable drive that works as well.

It's this driver issue that really keeps me from playing around with Openelec as well. Since core drivers are compiled into Openelec, you can't change them. I've raised this issue on the Openelec boards, and it went nowhere.
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Biostar TH61 mini-ITX motherboard and LAN0