I have a USB 3.0 AX88179 based Gigabit Ethernet adapter and after searching online, I found many people reporting success with this device under Linux. The driver entered the mainline kernel on version 3.9, but even before that, downloading the drivers from the the ASIX websites, compiling and loading the driver manually should work fine.
Unfortunately this is not the case for me on Ubuntu 12.10 and 13.04 on a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition. I compile the driver (v1.4.0) without any problems (make, make install), I load it using modprobe and I see it as eth2. I can even see some RX/TX traffic but it cannot acquire an IP address so it is unusable.
dmesg output:
[ 1338.583575] ASIX USB Ethernet Adapter:v1.4.0 10:01:27 Jun 26 2013
[ 1338.583575] http://www.asix.com.tw
[ 1338.583599] ax88179_178a 4-2:1.0 (unregistered net_device): mtu 1500
[ 1338.584080] ax88179_178a 4-2:1.0 eth0: register 'ax88179_178a' at usb-0000:00:14.0-2, ASIX AX88179 USB 3.0 Gigibit Ethernet, 00:24:9b:06:6a:85
[ 1338.585110] usbcore: registered new interface driver ax88179_178a
[ 1338.932157] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth2: link is not ready
[ 1338.933382] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth2: link is not ready
[ 1341.887977] ax88179_178a 4-2:1.0 eth2: ax88179_178a - Link status is: 1
[ 1341.889595] ax88179_178a 4-2:1.0 eth2: Write medium type: 0x013f
[ 1341.890699] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth2: link becomes ready
[ 1341.891748] ax88179_178a 4-2:1.0 eth2: link up, 1000Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0xC1E1
ifconfig output:
eth2 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:24:9b:06:6a:85
inet6 addr: fe80::224:9bff:fe06:6a85/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:76623 errors:1 dropped:22802 overruns:0 frame:1
TX packets:302 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:2601276 (2.6 MB) TX bytes:109741 (109.7 KB)
A different USB 2.0 Gigabit ethernet adapter and the WiFi are both working fine, so networking shouldn't be a problem on my laptop. Is there something I miss for this specific chipset?
FOLLOW UP
With the latest Kubuntu (and I guess Ubuntu as well) is working! So the problem is fixed. I guess it was a driver/kernel/hardware issue which is not present anymore with the latest kernel. I cannot tell the exact kernel version which made it to work, but for Trusty 14.04 everything looks fine!
ethtool
shows all modes, but only 10 and 100 mbits are advertised