Triple boot NIC issue

[littleconda]

Greetings all and thanks to Tony (and team) for making a simple way to enjoy OS X

I have a triple boot (win7_64, Gentoo, OS X-Hackintosh). All systems located on seperate HDD and are controlled by a physical switch to boot (loader for each system resides on its own respective HDD).

When Booting into Windows and OS X all goes well. If I exit OS X and boot into Gentoo (Linux), My NIC card (onboard realtek 81xx) (from a GA-P55M-UD2) would not activate. Lights would go on but I couldn't bring up the link. The only solution was to shutdown, pull the power for 10 seconds, plug back in and reboot, at which time the network would be fine. Seems to be a known issue with linux

As of 27 May 2007, in kernel 2.6.21.3, you may experience the issues with the r8169 driver if you dual boot Windows on some systems. Windows by defaults disables the NIC at Windows shutdown time in order to disable Wake-On-Lan, and this NIC will remain disabled until the next time Windows turns it on. The r8169 driver in the kernel does not know how to turn the NIC on from this disabled state; therefore, the device will not respond, even if the driver loads and reports that the device is up. To work around this problem, simply enable the feature "Wake-on-lan after shutdown." You can set this option through Windows' device manager.

Edit: Problem with dual-booting with Windows exist also in 2.6.19.5 and 2.6.20.8 kernel, so it is safe to assume that it will concern all 2.6 kernels until the kernel developers update the drivers for RTL8168 to the version that will be able to turn on the NIC from disabled state. (Corey)

Second edit: Powering off and unplugging the machine for a few seconds (around 10 usually does it) seems to reset the card, so it will work in Linux again until you boot Windows again.

source of quote and additional details

It's an old post, but still seems to be true to this day (I'm at kernel 2.6.34)

If I rebooted from windows to Linux, I would get the same dead NIC issue, the workaround was to "enable Wake on Lan on the windows side" Once that was enabled I could reboot between windows and linux and not have any NIC card issues.

So here is my question ,I'm not that familiar with OS X is there a way to do a similar fix like windows with the wake on LAN?

I have gone into energy saver (in OS X) and have both checked/unchecked "wake for ethernet access" and still get the "dead" NIC card when I boot into linux.

Anyone with an Idea of how to resolve this other than just "unplug the power between reboots"?

 

[Lnx2Mac]

I have gone into energy saver (in OS X) and have both checked/unchecked "wake for ethernet access" and still get the "dead" NIC card when I boot into linux.

You can try using my Beta Driver (http://bit.ly/RTL81xx), which currently has WOL as always enabled (you won't find the "wake for ethernet access" option in prefs)

 

[littleconda]

You can try using my Beta Driver (http://bit.ly/RTL81xx), which currently has WOL as always enabled (you won't find the "wake for ethernet access" option in prefs)

Thanks for the suggestion, but unfortunately it did not solve my problem. Using your driver worked fine in os x, but once I shut down and and booted into Linux I got the "dead" NIC thing going that could only be solved by pulling the power.

On a side note, when using your driver in os x and rebooting into Linux I got the "dead" NIC. Shutting down Linux and booting back into os x also showed a "dead" NIC and the os x network connections showed no network available (or unplugged, not exactly sure). The only way out was to pull the power.

When using the R1000SL I could exit os x, reboot into Linux and have the "dead" NIC. But rebooting out of Linux and back into os x I had a good network that didn't need the power reset technique.

Do you know of any cheap pci NIC that is supported? I quickly looked around, but nothing jumped out at me except the $Intel MT dual port$

 

[Lnx2Mac]

Thanks for the suggestion, but unfortunately it did not solve my problem. Using your driver worked fine in os x, but once I shut down and and booted into Linux I got the "dead" NIC thing going that could only be solved by pulling the power.

On a side note, when using your driver in os x and rebooting into Linux I got the "dead" NIC. Shutting down Linux and booting back into os x also showed a "dead" NIC and the os x network connections showed no network available (or unplugged, not exactly sure). The only way out was to pull the power.

Try entering "SmartLAN" in the BIOS instead of pulling the power...
Also, are you using the latest BIOS/DSDT for your board ?
I stopped dual booting to my Debian SID, as VirtualBox works wonderfully
Will try it anyway, but please report back so I can know whether to open a TODO on this or not.

Do you know of any cheap pci NIC that is supported? I quickly looked around, but nothing jumped out at me except the $Intel MT dual port$

Hmmm... No

 

[littleconda]

Im still

Bios (F11) and DSDT are current.

After installing driver (nice installer by the way, must be new or I missed it the first time around and did it the manual way) I rebooted and got tons of "AppleUSBUHCI: controller reset failed" and timeouts host controller haulted, resetting. It eventually got to the desktop, but keyboard and mouse were froze, had to hard reset. second boot it did the same thing and was froze. Third boot worked like a charm.

As far as the network coming up in linux after exiting os x, well it worked once and only once (not sure why) but I couldn't get it to keep doing it

An example was boot os x NIC was fine, shut down and boot into linux NIC was dead. rebooted back into os x nic was dead (networking prefs showed a 169.xxx.xxx.xxx address) so it seen the device, just couldn't use it via DHCP. I even attempted to configure it manually, but that failed.

The SmartLAN feature reset the card without having to pull the power. Through pure laziness I found that just entering bios (not even saving anything) was enough to "reset" the NIC.

Only thing I can think of is some sort of init.d script at shutdown that can reset the nic but i have no clue if that would work.

I'm rsyncing home and will probably start with a fresh install next week, but doubt if that will solve anything.

VirtualBox is in my sights. Thanks