Realtek RTL8111E - dropped packets in Windows7 / F15 dual-boot

[puntarenas]

Hello everybody,

my NIC drives me crazy and I need some help to gather all relevant informations to file a decent bug report. Maybe someone could guide me through this process.

My mainboard is an AsRock Z68 Pro3
http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.as...Specifications

I use a dual-boot setup with Windows7 installed in parallel to Fedora 15-x64. Whenever I had Windows in use and jjust reboot the system into Fedora, the NIC does not work as expected. Instead it goes in an endless "em1: link up" loop which results in very low bandwith or even complete network timeouts. This happens in Firefox as well as with yum or ping.

Originally Posted by dmesg

[ 58.763294] r8169 0000:05:00.0: em1: link up
[ 59.686773] r8169 0000:05:00.0: em1: link up
[ 61.936454] r8169 0000:05:00.0: em1: link up
[ 63.663459] r8169 0000:05:00.0: em1: link up
[ 69.003360] r8169 0000:05:00.0: em1: link up
[ 73.128973] r8169 0000:05:00.0: em1: link up
[ 73.813572] r8169 0000:05:00.0: em1: link up
[ 74.205342] r8169 0000:05:00.0: em1: link up
[ 83.216130] r8169 0000:05:00.0: em1: link up
[ 84.779226] r8169 0000:05:00.0: em1: link up
[ 86.299337] r8169 0000:05:00.0: em1: link up
[ 87.545618] r8169 0000:05:00.0: em1: link up
[ 88.932830] r8169 0000:05:00.0: em1: link up
[ 89.744345] r8169 0000:05:00.0: em1: link up
[ 91.577275] r8169 0000:05:00.0: em1: link up
[ 93.294294] r8169 0000:05:00.0: em1: link up
[...]

Here is the huge amount of dropped packages ifconfig shows just after a few seconds of random webbrowsing in this "link up" madness:

Originally Posted by ifconfig

em1 Link encap:Ethernet Hardware Adresse 00:25:22:b5:00:09
inet Adresse:192.168.2.100 Bcast:192.168.2.255 Maske:255.255.255.0
inet6 Adresse: fe80::225:22ff:fec3:9/64 Gültigkeitsbereich:Verbindung
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:3584 errors:0 dropped:3584 overruns:0 frame:3584
TX packets:4006 errors:0 dropped:10 overruns:0 carrier:0
Kollisionen:0 Sendewarteschlangenlänge:1000
RX bytes:2919729 (2.7 MiB) TX bytes:527705 (515.3 KiB)
Interrupt:45 Basisadresse:0xc000

If I directly cold boot into Fedora (after the power cord has been removed and the system got completely re-initialized) there are no problems at alll and I get a fast and stable network conection. This also happens with other linux distributions, for example SysRescCD.

Somehow Windows seems to leave the NIC in a state Linux is not able to deal with. Where should I report this issue and which informations would be helpful?

[puntarenas]

I found out that it is not even necessary to remove the power cord. Shutting down the system from Windows and turning it on using the power button on the case has the same result. Just warm starts result in network problems.

I contacted AsRock now and hope, they can improve their UEFI initialization routines, so that the NIC gets properly reset whenever the system restarts.

[puntarenas]

Just for the record, kernel 3.1 fixed this problem (tried with 3.1.0-0.rc8.git0.0.fc16.x86_64).