[elrepo] r8101/r8168/r8169 suggestion

[Manuel Wolfshant]

On October 26, 2017 9:36:41 PM GMT+03:00, Nick Howitt <nick at howitts.co.uk> wrote:
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>
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>OK. I'll let it go. One last side effect of this blacklisting, is that 
>if a user upgrades to say a 7.4 kernel, the latest kmod-r8168 driver 
>replaces the previous one compatible the 7.3 kernel. If the user then 
>reboots back to the 7.3 kernel he will have no NIC driver available. If
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>the blacklist weren't there, the r8168 NIC could fall back to using the
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>stock r8169 driver and at least have connectivity.
>>


Theoretically one installed the ElRepo r8168 kmod  in 7.3 as replacement of stock r8169 driver because stock driver failed to work. So reverting to 7.3 would have failed anyway without the kmod. And there is not much ElRepo can do when the required kernel symbols change between releases.

Niw, to make it very clear: I fully understand your point of view. But , from MY point of view, you have a very special / unusual edge case by using 2 different Realtek chipsets out of which one requires the stock driver and the other one the OEM driver. The normal approach should be to
- contact RH and ask them to update the stock driver (which, as Phil mentioned, is in fact rewritten by RH so as to unify all Realtek drivers under a single umbrella)
- use the 2 apropriate OEM drivers meanwhile.

I do not think that it is a good idea to force the iinstallation of all OEM drivers down the throat  of everyone else because of a corner case (for which there are workarounds).  So far , based on what I have seen during the last 10 years in the field in the 3rd world where I live,  Realtek chips are usually present on entry level systems with
a) either a single interface or 
b) two identical interfaces or 
c) two completely different but cheap interfaces. 
In my case for instance I had ("had" as in "decomissioned now") hundreds of systems  ( Asus IIRC) which were requiring forcedeth as the second network driver. And at the time , in order to do PXE installs as usual - ElRepo was not a thing yet, I had to use a driver disk to extend anaconda from Centos 5 because RH's r8169 did not support the revisions of the Realtek chipsets used in my motherboards (despite happily binding them -- I had revisions B or C and RH's driver only handled correctly rev. A). I even used to offer my DKMS packages for the OEM-based drivers to the world via my FedoraPeople page ( and wrote a couple pages in the Centos wiki documenting the various ways to tackle the problem, taking care to specify the exact chipset releases that needed the OEM drivers )
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