Realtek RTL8125 is a network interface card, that is integrated on modern mid to high range motherboards, such as Asus Prime with 12th and 13th generation Intel CPUs. RTL8125 is not supported by the default Realtek driver, that is loaded by the FreeBSD base system during boot. This presents several issues on a host with no Internet access. With a tip from a brilliant user on Discord, I was able to discover this work-around.
RTL8125 is supported by a non-default Realtek driver, that was written by Realtek for FreeBSD, but not adopted into the main driver, because of differences in coding standards. The driver is in ports as “realtek-re-kmod”. If the host does not have a connection to Internet, then this port has to be fetched on another host and then transferred via USB storage or alternative medium.
# fetch http://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:14:amd64/release_2/All/realtek-re-kmod-1100.00_1.pkg
The package can not be installed, because the host would still need Internet for that, because of package management. The driver can be extracted and manually placed in the directory for boot kernel modules.
# tar zxf realtek-re-kmod1100.00_1.pkg /boot/modules/if_re.ko # mv boot/modules/if_re.ko /boot/modules/
The driver needs to load during boot, while it is key to succes, that the “name” paramenter is set to the new driver. If this is omitted, then it will not work, because the old driver is loaded from “/boot/kernel”.
# vi /boot/loader.conf if_re_load="YES" if_re_name="/boot/modules/if_re.ko"
This will initialize the Realtek network interface card and DHCP for the network interface can be configured.
# vi /etc/rc.conf ifconfig_re0="DHCP"
Reboot.
# reboot
The complete procedure:
# dmesg # gpart show # gpart destroy -F /dev/da0 # gpart create -s mbr /dev/da0 # gpart add -t fat32 /dev/da0 # gpart show # newfs_msdos -L REALTEK -F 32 /dev/da0s1 # mount -t msdos /dev/da0s1 /mnt # cd /mnt # fetch http://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:14:amd64/release_2/All/realtek-re-kmod-1100.00_1.pkg # sync # cd # umount /mnt # mount -t msdos /dev/da0s1 /mnt # cp /mnt/*.pkg . # umount /mnt # tar zxf realtek-re-kmod1100.00_1.pkg /boot/modules/if_re.ko # mv boot/modules/if_re.ko /boot/modules/ # vi /boot/loader.conf if_re_load="YES" if_re_name="/boot/modules/if_re.ko" # vi /etc/rc.conf ifconfig_re0="DHCP" # reboot