Control: tags -1 moreinfo Control: affects -1 r8125-dkms Hi Nathan,
> I'm sorry if I sent this to the wrong place
You're doing everything right.
> I believe this chipset should be set to use the 8125 driver by default, to
> prevent this.
Due to an unfortunate state of affairs, it is intentional that there are two
different drivers for this hardware. Allow me to explain.
• In spite of the name, the r8169 driver is intended to support a wide variety
of Realtek Ethernet chips, including yours. This driver is developed by the
community and is part of the Linux kernel. The quality of the code is good, so
it's easy for folks to report bugs, try out fixes, and add on support for new
Realtek chips. Most importantly, it's possible for anyone interested to modify
the code to suit their needs, which is an important part of free/libre
software—what we're all about at Debian. This is the best driver for users to
use first.
• On the other hand, the r8125 driver comes from the folks at Realtek who made
the chip. Legal issues prevent it being a proper part of Debian. Additionally,
the code contains "blobs", sequences of "magic numbers" that change the code on
the network card. No one outside of Realtek is able to tell what these actually
do, and that's a barrier for anyone wanting to fix problems. The folks at
Realtek don't usually release datasheets or technical information that's needed
to understand how the cards work. Realtek does not generally incorporate user
feedback and their driver may not always work with the latest kernel version.
In spite of all of this, the r8125 driver is offered in the non-free section of
the package archive as an option for users to try if they want to.
I am glad that the r8125 driver is working for you. It looks like the default
r8168 driver is *supposed* to work for your network chipset, but as you've
found that's not true. I'd like to get more information to figure out what's
gone wrong, so I can do some detective work and try to make this work better
for other users.
Could you open a terminal emulator and run this command:
reportbug -p --template linux-image-$(uname -r) | tee ~/kernel-info.txt
This will create a text file in your home directory called kernel-info.txt with
a lot of information. You can skim through that to make sure there's nothing
private and then send it back here. Thanks and let me know if you need help
P.S. for kernel folks: these are the most similar upstream issues. The problems
are with older packages or missing/outdated firmware, so these ought to be
surmounted in testing already.
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=214371
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217362
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