Intel Killer E3100G not working

Hi everyone,

I recently purchased an ASRock B550 PG Riptide moederbord for an simple Truenas build. I bought it mostly because of its built in Intel 2.5GbE (Killer E3100G). However, Truenas does not recognize the network controller.

I did some research before hand and I did see that Truenas does not work nicely with Realtek network controllers.

Is there anything i can do to get the Intel network controller working or do I have to buy an Intel i225 v3?

Any information would be appreciated.

Since you tagged this post with ā€˜COREā€™ I guess best bet would be to see if Scale supports it. Generally better driver support on Scale.

Otherwise? Likely SOL.

The ā€œKillerā€ branding is highly suspicious and all 2.5 GbE NICs are known to have issues, even the latest Intel i226.
Better get a X540/X710, Chelsio T520 or Solarflare NIC.

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I will indeed try install Scale and see whether or not that fixes the issue.

Otherwise I will look into the X540, X710, T520 or Solarflare

AAAAAAnd? Did Scale fix it, the internets want to know donā€™t leave googlers hanging.
The answer is Yes. Yes Scale supports this card and so should Core.

ā€œKillerā€ branding is highly suspicious

What exactly is suspicious about this branding? Itā€™s the same 2.5gbe NIC that was installed in countless iterations during itā€™s period. Iā€™ve owned this machine for a long time and this NIC has never failed or produced anomalous behavior. Why then is it not supported by TrueNAS?

Donā€™t know about now, but years ago when I used it under Windows, the killer driver leaked memory like crazy. I would be running out of RAM after about a few days of running and I would start getting Out of Memory warnings cause the driver was hogging 8 GB on its own. The only fix was to reboot once every few days and that was a deal breaker for me, so I replaced the NIC.

Also bit off-topicā€¦ what was marketing thinking with that branding name?

I feel fortunate I never dealt with that.

Branding is harder than it looks. But ya, name didnā€™t hold up to time well.

Gaming. Itā€™s still a garbage NIC, but slap a ā€œcoolā€ name on it, and people will buy it. Especially if itā€™s cheap.

Best feature was the go-faster red colouring :wink:

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I went desktop parts after years of running server grade parts and got the ASRock B650E PG Riptide with the ā€œKillerā€ Intel E3100G 2.5gb NIC ā€¦ I donā€™t know if it would have worked in Core because CORE wouldnā€™t boot up on my AM5 setup ā€¦ So I installed SCALE. I had a cheap Mellanox 10GBe SFP+ NIC on standby , but the onboard NIC has been working flawlessly plugged into a cheap 2.5gb switch

Currently Iā€™m only running Plex and some SAMBA shares

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Its technically an Intel NIC these days. You canā€™t really complain about and say ā€œuse intel nicsā€ :wink:

BUT its a poster child for the ā€œlinux has broader driver support than bsdā€ really

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Honesty? By your recount, this NIC is a genuine system killerā€¦

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Dang it. Now that you mention it, I couldā€™ve made that killer pun!

Much doubt. Realtek.

Hereā€™s where support was added to the FreeBSD realtek-re-kmod driver in ports. No other changes or additions to the driver, just picking up the ā€œKillerā€ Device ID.

This is also the clue for how to make it work in TrueNAS CORE. You need the improved support from that package. If youā€™re interested there are a few ways to accomplish it.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/215261/intel-killer-ethernet-e3100-2-5-gbps/specifications.html

Intel supports it ā€¦ did the ā€œKillerā€ NICs start out life as a modified Realtek controller?

Theyā€™re just the most recent to own the brand. Iā€™m surprised that it survived Intelā€™s semi-recent ā€œsimplificationā€ purge.

Gamer-friendly branding must be a (very) profitable activity, so itā€™s not going away any time soon.

As for us, any hint of gamer branding (Killer, Assssin, Vengeance, weapons of all kindsā€¦) should be treated as definitive evidence that the hardware is not suitable for a server.
As far as Iā€™m concerned, any hint of gamer branding, or any reference to overclocking, makes the product unsuitable for ANY use, including desktop. This principle makes shopping a lot easier. :wink:

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Donā€™t forget the useless, (and energy consuming), stupid LEDs everywhere. (Stupid for a serverā€¦ if someone wants to pimp out their desktop / gaming rig, fine.)

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The very first generation of these cards was kinda interesting. A whole-ass networking coprocessor. You could run apps on the cards directly. It didnā€™t work, but it was at least interesting.

But then CPUs got faster. The brand has been gamer-woo ever since then.

There are still plenty of edgy cool 1337 names in Enterprise.
I submit to evidence: CrowdStrike

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You must not use the CS word! The world could fall apart, and the sky fall!

Oh wait, that already happened yesterday. Well, that is proof that monopolies and lack of tiered roll-out are bad.