Odroid H2+, Realtek RTL8125B drivers

The new H2+ is out and I'm looking a picking one up as that would make all my systems running x86_64.

Looking on Hardkernels site was a warning.

ODROID-H2+ – ODROID

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Please manually install Realtek RTL8125B driver to activate the Ethernet ports. Otherwise the Ethernet ports don’t work due to a missing device driver in Linux Kernel.

Does LE include this driver already or is this going to require a special build

Thx.

I do believe that LE is built on Ubuntu 18.04 which is not using kernel 5.4.

Kernel 5.4, from what I've read is avail in Ubuntu 20.04

networking - How do I get a RTL8125 2.5GbE Controller working on 18.04 LTS - Ask Ubuntu

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RTL8125 is supported natively by kernel 5.4. In a little over a month, you will be able to switch to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with this kernel version.

@chewitt, can you confirm?

Thanks for looking into this guys. I'm slowly picking up Linux but I'm not far enough along to figure this stuff out with any certainty.

OK, H2+ arrived, got it all built, installed LE onto the NVME (boots stupid fast) but alas! No network.

So linux drivers are missing for the Realtek RTL8125B.

Anyone care to help a semi newb on getting these drivers installed? Obviously we can't SSH into the box. Is there a way to install them via usb drive?

Hey smp So I DL'd the first nightly (9.80) which took quite a while. Not sure why the DL was so slow.

I moved it over to the Update folder (which I had to create because it wasn't already there ??) rebooted the box and nothing happened. LE didn't go through an update process with the new image file.

Was this the wrong approach to get this image installed?

smp, duh It's been a while since I had to do this manually. Found the hidden files. Moved the img file over and it installed as expected.

BUT, still no network.

It's plugged in, the NIC is blinking but the system can't see it.

Just to point out in the event that there is a difference. The board has the Realtek RTL8125B version NIC. Is there a non 'B' version as well and that is the version that is prevalent?

@chewitt Any chance that this NIC could be added to the list of devices included in the next build? (pretty please)

A.

PS. Is there a reason the reply to thread window is gone? I can't add a reply.

A direct pull from Hardkernels wiki for the H2/H2+

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The original H2 and H2 REV.B carried 2 x 1 GbE NIC whose driver is included in both Windows 10 and the recent Linux distributions. On the other hand the ODROID H2+ (a.k.a. REV.B+) is equipped with 2 x 2.5 GbE NIC based on the Realtek 8125B chipset. This chipset is rather recent and its support in Windows 10 stock is kind of intermediate and even non-existing on many recent Linux distributions.

For Linux, see discussion there: Re: Unrecognized RTL8125 in r8169 — Netdev

So as of this writing (June 2020) and in both cases, Windows 10 and Linux, you have to manually install the Realtek 8125B driver after you have installed the operating system. There is no doubt that the driver will end up in the upstream OSes at some point, but for now you have to install the driver yourself. It’s a rather simple affair anyway.

So here's my position.

I first looked for a way to get a console from inside KODI. There was the System Tools addon from the LE Rep but I can't manually download the addon zip like you can the Kodi addons. So dead end there.

I then learned that editing the syslinux.cfg file and adding textmode would boot you into console. I copied the syslinux.cfg file to a USB drive and edited it on the laptop. I also downloaded the Realtek driver DEB file and copied both the edited syslinux file and the deb file to bring back to the H2+. Bang, another door slammed.I can't copy the syslinux.cfg file back to the flash folder. So that means I still can't get a console to install the driver files.

I tried the control, alt, F3 command. Didn't do anything.

So I'm sitting on about $350 of hardware I can't really do anything with.

SO I tried the manual install on my first x86 system which I do have SSH access. I figured install the drivers on that one, image the system and restore it on the new H2+.

Manual installation

In a console window:

...$ cd ~/Downloads
...$ wget master.zip -O realtek-8125-dkms.zip
...$ unzip realtek-r8125-dkms-master.zip
...$ cd realtek-r8125-dkms-master/
...$ sudo ./autorun.shIf you do not want to use wget use whatever command your prefer (i.e git clone).

After executing these commands, you should have the NIC available for configuration using the Network Manager or equivalent.

If you want to know what the autorun.sh does before executing it, just open it in your favorite text editor (vim, pluma, etc.)

You can also find the REALTEK_README.txt into the folder providing additional information.

I guess you have to have the hardware in the system in order for it to install the drivers. Ended up with an error on line 30 of the autorun.sh script.

Anyone else able to help get this working for the meantime? I've looked into compiling my own but that's about 100 levels up from what I am able to do with linux at the moment. I couldn't figure out how to get the latest kernel. I ran a docker container from an Ubuntu image in the DHub repository. Turned out is was Kernel 3.x. I'm out of my depths here.