4x40s owners, please test RealtekR1000SL.kext

Attention ProBook 4x40s owners:

Since discovering the performance problem with Mieze's RealtekRTL8111.kext with SMB (Windows, Samba, etc.) file shares, and no fix in sight, I decided to take a look at slice's RealtekR1000SL.kext.

Last I tried it, it would only connect at 1GB if you forced it, and there were issues if you forced 100MB/sec, and other strange issues without a cable plugged in. So... I learned a bit about the code and fixed those issues last night and today. It works great on my 4530s and has reasonable performance over GBe to my Windows Home Server 2011 (a variant of Windows Server 2008 R2).

I'm curious to know if it works on the 4x40s or if it suffers the issue that plagued the lnx2mac RealtekRTL81xx.kext.

So, if you have a 4x40s can you install this driver and test it? Be sure to remove any other Realtek driver you have installed, and remember to repair permissions & rebuild cache before rebooting.

Reference to performance issues: http://www.tonymacx86.com/hp-proboo...-1-beta-ivy-bridge-support-64.html#post604435

Also one more report here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/hp-proboo...-1-beta-ivy-bridge-support-69.html#post612985

Slice's thread on Insanely: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/286937-realtekr1000-v3/

RealtekR1000SL.kext is attached below:

Tested with my 4540s.
Method: copy a HD movie ~ 5GB from my Linux NAS to 4540s, via Gigabit connection.
-With old RealtekRTL81xx.kext: speed around 5MB/s, disappointedly slow.
-With RM's new RealtekR1000SL.kext: speed is consistently around 25MB/s, which is my NAS's maximum read speed
Good job, RehabMan

I know your asking 4x40s owners to test this, but I have a 4530s and thought I would test it too. Im the one from that other post with issues with Mieze's RealtekRTL8111.kext, which is still the same over afp slow speeds and actually now sometimes stops transferring large files to my NAS.

Anyway with the old lnx2mac RealtekRTL81xx.kext, I have no problems, using afp, read speads of around 100MB/s and write speeds of around 60MB/s to my NAS. With this new RealtekR1000SL.kext, it works perfectly fine, with very similar speeds. So im thinking (if it aint broke) I could carry on using lnx2mac kext or are there advantages to using this new kext you have modified?

Thanks.

wires10 said:

I know your asking 4x40s owners to test this, but I have a 4530s and thought I would test it too. Im the one from that other post with issues with Mieze's RealtekRTL8111.kext, which is still the same over afp slow speeds and actually now sometimes stops transferring large files to my NAS.

Anyway with the old lnx2mac RealtekRTL81xx.kext, I have no problems, using afp, read speads of around 100MB/s and write speeds of around 60MB/s to my NAS. With this new RealtekR1000SL.kext, it works perfectly fine, with very similar speeds. So im thinking (if it aint broke) I could carry on using lnx2mac kext or are there advantages to using this new kext you have modified?

Thanks.

Click to expand...

For one, lnx2mac doesn't work with the 4x40s, and we'd like to have one ethernet kext for both the 4x30s and 4x40s in the ProBook Installer. For two, lnx2mac never released his source code (which is just not right). Having source means we can fix things, and personally I'd rather run something open source that I can build myself vs. closed where I can't look inside.

What you want to use on your machine is personal choice.

Improvement on a 4740s from max 8.6 MB/s to max 12.7MB/s. Tested with a gigabit connection to an old powerbook using "dd if=/dev/zero | ssh ......local 'cat >/dev/null' ".

dg