About damn time. We got a boost every few years from 10 to 100 to 1000. Then we just… Stopped. Stagnated. It’s understandable why, for a good long time one gigabit was all anybody needed, 100 MByte/sec is pretty good even for a NAS.
Of course then fiber ISPs got in the game, now in a lot of places you can buy 7-8gbps as a consumer product. And even multi-gig, which was supposed to ‘fix’ this, really ended up being insufficient. You could make a salad argument that multi gig was a waste of time and we should have just started moving to 10 gig.
Unfortunately, 10 gig switches still carry a significant premium. But this will start to shake that up. Sooner the better.
Ahhh. First world problems are always a great read
My 25 mbps isp speeds make me sad.
Realtek are monsters of semiconductor creation.
Destroyed
- sound card industry
- network card industry
What’s next?
Literally anyone else could have done this. They all chose not to. So fuck them.
Excellent!
Now if we can only teach realtek how pci device id’s work, so they don’t use revision id’s to control power management, and links silently don’t come up if your kernel driver doesn’t support it properly.
I know this was a decade ago, but yeah, I’m still pretty damn pissed.
It’s impressive that they got the power consumption down to less than 2 watts. I think this is the first 10GBASE-T NIC I’ve seen that doesn’t have a heatsink on it.
And they did it on Cat5e! I have a Cat5e “trunk” that I really don’t want to try to restring, but it’s a choke point that I’d like to upgrade from 1Ge. If only someone will build SOHO switches with it
Cat 5e has 8 wires just like any later standard. There’s nothing stopping you from trying a faster speed on it.
It is being pushed beyond its ratings, so there’s no guarantees that it will work. There’s no harm in trying Cat5e at higher speeds if it’s already installed, but don’t install it with the intention of using it at more than 2.5G.
Usually you’d be fine to use 5e for like 100ft 33m
1 or 2.5g sure, not 5 or 10.
Anecdotal, but I’m doing 10g over a 100ft 5e cable. It’s not technically supported, but it does work on short runs.
Can we finally get some affordable 10GbE switches too?
Right?! Most affordable 10G switches are SFP+ which requires a lot more research to make sure you get the right modules and cabling.
A lot of those modules would work fine if the companies didn’t fuck with their drivers.
The Linux ixgbe driver (for Intel 82598 and 82599 chipsets) was submitted with a whitelist for Intel SFP+ adapters. Linux devs added a module option to shut off the whitelist, and tons of stuff is perfectly compatible.
Just use DACs within the rack. Single mode fiber patches and SFP+ optics are also cheap and easy to find.
DACs are great, agreed. However try telling that to the guy next door. The reason ethernet got to be so popular was because of how familiar it was and similar it us to telephone wire. There were several other competing standards befofe ethernet won.
10GbE cards and switches help regular folk upgrade without needing to learn about DACs.
Always amazes me how few people seem to know about DACs. I use them extensively in racks. They’re inexpensive and easy to use.
Cisco c3850-12x48u is about $150 on eBay.
- 802.3bt (60watt) PoE on all ports
- 36x 1gig rj45 ports
- 12x 1/2.5/5/10gig rj45 ports
- Has a module slot that you can add 4x or 8x (8x is rare so expensive) 10gig sfp+
The main problem is the idle power consumption. About 150w with nothing plugged in.
Not to mention the fans volume.
what is “affordable” to you? there are $100-$300 10GbE switches out there.
I’d like something that can replace my dinky little unmanaged 16-port gigabit switch for less than $300. Right now The only things I can find in that price bracket have maybe 5 ports. I’d settle for something that can just do 2.5/5Gb on all ports.
That’ll be a while, there isn’t much push yet (1gbe is still pretty fast) and you can do 2.5 if you want to push, they’re basically starting to replace 1gbe with 2.5gbe as a drop in.
WiFi kind of screwed everything because it’s 90-95% of all user clients, so if wifi can’t handle the bandwidth, the bandwidth is considered ‘commercial’ and they charge you through the nose.
Wasn’t it Realtek who made 1GbE popular as well by making the cheap 8111 IC over two decades ago?
And fucked it up by releasing the 8169 with a stepping change that added power management.
The kernel driver didn’t know this, so links would silently not come up, and you wouldn’t know why till you googled and learned you had to rebuild your kernel for your new motherboard.
Great to (maybe) see 10GbE coming and the initial price sounds reasonable compared to currently avaipable 2.5G and 5G Realtek adapters.
Apparently Linux 6.16 will have the driver included.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-Realtek-RTL8127ARealtek itself has demonstrated its RTL8127 NIC working with an unknown switch using cheap CAT5E cables, and the company’s representatives at the booth emphasised this fact. However, we do not know which switch or router the company used. Yet, most 10GbE routers and switches are designed for CAT6 cabling.
Funny update about the cabling they used during the demo. There’s really no reason Cat 5e couldn’t work for short enough distances with little interference. It’s more about the guaranteed minimum distance you can get, 55m with Cat 6 and the full 100m for any rating beyond that.
At least it’s not Marvell. But, man, can we pay another 17c and get … I guess not Broadcom as they’re waxing seriously dinkish, but who else?
Intel is probably still the gold standard. I’d pay a few bucks more to have something much more reliable.
Intel is probably still the gold standard.
I guess you’re not familiar with the i225-v and its variants. Intel burned their reputation for good NICs with that fiasco.
That’s too bad. I had a recent bad experience w/ a WiFi card, and I hoped that was a one-off since it was a budget chip. But you and someone else brought up more recent examples, so maybe Intel has lost its NIC crown.
Who should we look to now? I just want a solid NIC on Linux.
The Realtek RTL8125B on my year-old motherboard has been doing fine with Linux’s r8169 driver.
I’ve only used it at 1gbit/second, though; I haven’t tested its 2.5gbit mode.
Ever since the BE200 debacle I don’t know if I can trust Intel to deliver. Sure, the stuff that’s already out there works but who knows if any of their future stuff will?
They’re apparently in talks to sell off their network division. Future there is really up in the air.
Yeah, I had a bad experience with one of their other budget WiFi chips too. Maybe their hardware is getting worse, but they at least provide decent drivers.
Serious question: What do you use a 10GbE adapter for? Are there ISPs which offer 10gigabit bandwidth? I suppose it would be useful on a LAN
edit:
Bro, tell that my German table first.
E.g., NAS on my LAN, especially for streaming high res video to devices in my house.
you’re streaming over a Gb worth of video? even a full 4k blu ray rip is less than 1/10 of that.
Well, no I’m not. You’re right. I miscalculated how much data was needed for video streaming. Even multiple simultaneous hi-res streams should stream fine with 1GbE.
But as an abstracted idea, you might want high throughput within your LAN for some reaosn, even if an ISP doesn’t offer 10Gbps to your house.
I want it cause number is higher…
File transfers between devices is one reason. With NVME R/W speeds you can easily saturate 1Gb networking equipment. I think 10Gb is more than most people need most of the time but it would still be nice to have if it weren’t so expensive. I just bought a small 2.5Gb switch to connect my server and PC together since both have 2.5Gb NICs and that seems to be a happy medium.
My gigabit connection is good enough for my NAS, as the read speeds on the hard drive itself tend to be limited to about a gigabit/s anyway. But I could see some kind of SSD NAS benefiting from a faster LAN connection.
If you shell money out for a full-flash NAS, you have the money to buy the bandwidth easily by the truckload.
Old meme is old. I’m in Central Wyoming with reasonably priced 2Gb/s FTTH and I could order 10Gb/s if I wanted it.
LAN for sure.
There are multiple ISPs that offer 10Gbps Internet service in Japan and South Korea, I imagine other densely populated cities might have them also. There is also the Swiss ISP that offers 25Gbps Internet service since 2021.
Though I agree it is probably more used for LANs.
Example of an ISP providing 10Gb/s in Portugal here and at 15 euros a month it’s pretty cheap too.
That same ISP is from Romania and is also in Spain though curiously in this latter their Net Only 10Gb/s subscription costs €25 per month,
Personally I don’t see the point of it for myself at home, but for a small business I can see it making sense.
ISPs in Switzerland offer up to 10 or 25Gbit over fiber.
https://www.init7.net/en/internet/fiber7/
But even within a LAN it really allows using a NAS for anything, not just slow access data.
8gbps here in USA… Quantum fiber.
I know of a few others in my area as well… Google Fiber, AT&T is offering 5gbps I think… Wyyerd is a local-ish one that’s offering 8gbps…
In the Netherlands there’s a few ISPs offering 4Gb and one even 8Gb iirc. Personally can’t really think of a use case for that though.
Realistically with my 1Gb connection, it’s always the outside restricting speeds. I seem to get the speed I pay for but every download or stream is throttled
Steam downloads consistently saturate my 1 Gbps connection, but it’s still fast enough for me. Had it a year now, still not really used to things going that fast.
I connect my primary and backup servers on 10G directly via a crossover cable for transferring ZFS snapshots. No actual 10G switches or anything at the moment but if I add any more servers I need to back up I’ll probably get a small 10G switch to put in between.
I’m backing up my physical media so I pretty regularly move hundreds of GB around. That would take forever on a 1G network.
I also take a ton of GoPro video(skydiving/motorcycle). An hour of 360 footage is ~50GB. So just moving that around is cumbersome.
I have a 5G fiber connection and even my wireless access point(AP) is 10G. Sure, you can’t get that to a single device(WiFi) but my phone connects at 2.4G up/down. So ~3 modern phones downloading games or whatever has the possibility to saturate my internet connection. They could saturate the AP by downloading media from my backups for offline playback for a flight or whatever.
My ISP (Bouygues, in France) offers 8Gbps at no additional cost over 1Gbps.
Realtek, don’t they have issues with drivers in FreeBSD? Or am I horribly out of date.
In any case I’m excited, even if i barely tap into 1gbe capability most of the time.
Realtek Freebsd drivers are ‘ok’ now, but that was a long fight.
Outside of wifi (I mean Jesus christ) most of freebsd networking got fixed a decade ago, but you still need to stick with common-ish gear.
Freebsd on kvm though, that’s a game breaker, especially with sriov mellanox.
Not sure if they provide official drivers for FreeBSD. Intel is usually a safer bet in that case.
To make use of a 10Gb network, wouldn’t I also need all of my equipment in between things to support 10Gb? Where am I supposed to get a 10Gb modem for residential use?
modem
You don’t need 10GbE WAN to make use of it on your LAN. If you have a lot of internal traffic (self hosting, for example), you really just need an internal router and some switches to support it. It’s more convenient to have your modem be your main router, but that’d not necessary.
I think that these just aren’t for me. I’ve considered upgrading my gear to 2.5Gb from 1Gb, but it just doesn’t feel worth it to me. Maybe in ten years when everything’s cheaper and more accessible.
If everything is constrained by your internet connection, it’s probably not worth it.
This will help within your home network, such as with a file server or vm host, large video files. Not everyone fits those use cases
I don’t fit those use cases either, but I want to
I do, but honestly anything past gigabit is overkill currently. My fileserver currently works over WiFi, and 100-200mbps is still plenty fot 1 UHD stream. Faster is always better, but 2.5gbps would already be overkill for what I need, so the extra cost of 10gbps isn’t needed.
That said, it’s feasible to get a 10gbps LAN today. Regular cat6 should be totally fine, and it’s pretty inexpensive.
3~5Gbps fiber is readily available in a lot of places. And some of us have internal networks with network attached storage and various servers running locally.
I have a NAS and servers as well. Do you have a router separate from your modem that these pass through?
Do you have a router separate from your modem that these pass through?
I’m not them, but I do. I like that my ISP does not have any equipment on my internal network.
I have a separate switch if that’s what you mean.
Also the NAS has 10Gbe already, I could have that plugged directly to my desktop for faster transfers until I get a 10Gbe switch.
Point being, 10Gbe at home isn’t that far fetched. I’ve had Gbe for what? 20 years?
So you have NAS to switch, switch to PC? And then that switch goes to the router/modem?
Correct
Thanks, I’ll have to consider this setup.
I use 10GbE for my internal network for my Ceph cluster. I’ve come about 80% of theoretical maximum for brief spikes from my NVMe drives rebalancing (mostly HDDs, few SSDs, couple NVMes).
Last part that I need is for SSDs to come down in price to where ~80TB isn’t too ridiculous (that’s 40TB usable space with RAID1). Cut the price per TB in half two more times to make it there. Otherwise, spinning platters are the bottleneck with my 10Gb network.
Which probably would have happened in the next few years if not for tariffs.
Even without tariffs, the collusion between nand manufacturers to keep prices high meant 2030 would be the earliest that 8tb SSDs would be “affordable”
Where am I supposed to get a 10Gb modem for residential use?
There are a few routers that have SFP+ slots so you can modulate to any laser signal your provider might require.
- FRITZ!Box 5690 Pro
- Zyxel AX7501
- TP-Link Deco BE85
Otherwise if you’re looking for strictly only a modem there are various available. They are usually simply called fiber to ethernet converter. Startek, Delock, Trendnet, FS
If you meant a switch, well 10G switches are abundant. Zyxel, Netgear, TP-Link all the usual suspects.
Even with the sfp+ ports some providers make not using their provided modem a real headache. (Looking at att)
