firmware-realtek

[ticojohn]

I ran into an interesting issue when I upgraded from Buster to Bullseye. Before upgrading I had been using the firmware-realtek package for my NIC. After upgrading I discovered that whenever I would do a reboot the NIC would would be a in an unusable state. From my research it appears that the specific chipset that I have sets a bit in a register and that bit doesn't get reset during a warm reboot, thus preventing use. Bummer. However, by installing the r8168-dkms package everything works fine. This is my controller:

product: RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller

And from the package description in Synaptic Package Manager:

r8168 is the Linux device driver released by RealTek for their network
controllers with PCI-Express interface:
* 10/100/1000M Gigabit Ethernet: RTL8111B, RTL8111C, RTL8111D, RTL8111E,
RTL8111F, RTL8111G(S), RTL8111H(S), RTL8118(A)(S), RTL8119i, RTL8111L,
RTL8168B, RTL8168E, RTL8168H, RTL8111DP, RTL8111EP, RTL8111FP, RTL8411,
RTL8411B

This driver should only be used for devices not yet supported by the
in-kernel driver r8169.

Apparently something changed in Bullseye such that the firmware-realtek package no longer works as it did previously. Maybe somebody is working on the realtek-firmware package to rectify this issue, but it's not a big deal for me as the r8168-dkms package works for me. But this might be heads up for others that might be having a similar problem.

[sunrat]

r8168-dkms is a driver package, not firmware. Very likely you still need firmware-realtek as well.
Realtek have so many different chipsets, each one needs to be considered individually. Some work out of the box if firmware is installed, some need special module parameters, some need a driver to be compiled or installed, and some are just bastards that never work properly. I have one in the last category which worked OK with a certain driver built from Github but never was 100% reliable so it now has been sitting in a cupboard unused for several years.

[ticojohn]

r8168-dkms is a driver package, not firmware. Very likely you still need firmware-realtek as well.
Realtek have so many different chipsets, each one needs to be considered individually. Some work out of the box if firmware is installed, some need special module parameters, some need a driver to be compiled or installed, and some are just bastards that never work properly. I have one in the last category which worked OK with a certain driver built from Github but never was 100% reliable so it now has been sitting in a cupboard unused for several years.

Absolutely. I wasn't saying that the the firmware-realtek package wasn't required. Sorry if that was how it came across. Just that the driver wasn't functioning as I wanted it to without also having the dkms package installed. Thanks for making that clear.