Over the last wee while I have been running this server on the Intel Dual Core Atom D945GCLF2 board, replacing my old via EPIA 9000 motherboard.

Overall the performance and usability have been fantastic. I’ve installed Centos 5 on the board and carry out updates as they happen.

The only problem I have come across is the network driver. The board has a RealTek 8111c chip on board which is not stable with the stock kernel supplied.

The solution for this is to pull down the latest driver from the realtek web site.

At this present moment this is r8168-8.014.00, installing the driver is extremely simple using the following commands :

Unpack the tarball :
# tar vjxf r8168-8.aaa.bb.tar.bz2

Change to the directory:
# cd r8168-8.aaa.bb

If you are running the target kernel, then you should be able to do :

# make clean modules    (as root or with sudo)
# make install
# depmod -a
# modprobe r8168

You can check whether the driver is loaded by using following commands.

# lsmod | grep r8168
# ifconfig -a

The only modification I made was to the modprobe.conf file by ensuring that the alisas for eth0 pointed to the new driver.

All you need is the line

alias eth0 r8168

After that all network activity is extremely stable 🙂