[ltp] x100e ethernet

[Clinton Baker]

Hello,

I recently acquired an x100e.  Since I got it, I've mostly been using 
the wireless, but lately I've needed it plugged into the ethernet and 
have noticed that anywhere between 20 minutes to a few hours, the 
ethernet will just stop working.

When it dies, it just seems to stop routing traffic.  I can ping its IP, 
but not the gateway.  Of course, nothing is being logged other than the 
failure to renew the DHCP lease, if left going long enough.  Ethtool 
shows the same information if it is working or not.  In an attempt to 
find out exactly when it dies, I found that pinging the machine once 
every minute will keep it working indefinitely, so it appears that there 
is something to do with being idle that kills it.  The only way to get 
networking back is to remove and re-modprobe the driver module.

With this in mind, I've tried disabling acpi on the PCI bus, disabling 
acpi completely, turning off PCI power management on the PCI bus in the 
BIOS, updating the BIOS to the latest from Lenovo's site (v1.31) and 
have been unsuccessful.  I've had the same problem in Debian stable, 
Gentoo running the 2.6.38.6 kernel as well as in (currently) Slackware 
running 2.6.37.6.  Linux wants to use the r8169 driver module, but I've 
installed the r8168 module from realtek and am still having the same 
problem.  It has never run windows, but I'm almost at the point to 
install it and see if the problem exists there, too.

Has anyone else seen this on an x100e or another machine with the 
RTL8111/8168B ethernet card?  I've not yet found anything searching 
google.  This little thing is perfect in every way except for this one 
problem.

Thanks,
clint