P3 PCIe Ethernet adapter

The P3 10Gbps Ethernet PCIe Network Interface Card works out of the box in all Linux distributions that have at least kernel 6.16, which was released on 2025-07-27, or any later kernel. This includes for example Ubuntu 25.10+, Fedora 42+, ArchLinux 2025.09.01+, Manjaro 26.0+, Kali Linux 2025.4+ and other recent distributions.

💡 Tip: To see if your distribution supports this adapter out of the box, run the following command; if the output is non-empty, it supports it:

# grep 10EC.*8127 /lib/modules/*/modules.alias
/lib/modules/7.0.0-27-generic/modules.alias:alias pci:v000010ECd00008127sv*sd*bc*sc*i* r8169
...

The following paragraphs describe how to install a newer kernel in some older distributions that do not have a 6.16+ kernel.

Ubuntu 24.04 Noble Numbat

Ubuntu 24.04 Noble Numbat may have either the 6.8 kernel, or the 7.0 kernel, depending on which installation media you used. To install the 7.0 kernel, run the following command and reboot:

sudo apt install linux-generic-hwe-24.04

Debian 13 Trixie

Debian 13 Trixie normally comes with the 6.12 kernel. To install the latest kernel from trixie-backports, run the following command and reboot:

sudo apt install -t trixie-backports linux-image-$(dpkg --print-architecture)

Source compilation

It’s also possible to manually compile the driver in older distributions where it doesn’t work out of the box. Start by installing the dkms package, or at least gcc, make and the kernel headers. Then go to the Realtek driver page and download the driver source code, or just run the following commands:

wget linux.brostrend.com/p3/r8127-11.016.00.tar.bz2
tar xf r8127-11.016.00.tar.bz2
cd r8127-11.016.00
sudo make
sudo make install
sudo depmod
sudo modprobe r8127

Technical information

The PCI ID and the driver in use can be shown using the following command:

# lspci -nn -k | grep -A 3 Ethernet
0000:01:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8127 10GbE Controller [10ec:8127] (rev 05)
        Subsystem: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device [10ec:0123]
        Kernel driver in use: r8169
        Kernel modules: r8169