Re: Issue with RTL8111 NIC after upgrade to kernel 4.19

[Heiner Kallweit]

On 21.11.2018 21:20, Andrew Lunn wrote:
>> request_module() is supposed to be synchronous, however after some
>> reading this may not be 100% guaranteed. Maybe the module init
>> function on some systems isn't finished yet when request_module()
>> returns. As a result the genphy driver may be used instead of
>> the PHY version-specific driver.
> 
> Hi Heiner
> 
> That would be true for all PHYs i think. We would of noticed this
> problem with other systems using other PHY drivers.
> 
> 	Andrew
> 
It could be a timing issue affecting certain systems only. At least
for now I don't have a good explanation why loading the module via
request_module() and loading it upfront manually makes a difference.

One affected user just reported the PHY to be a RTL8211B. This is
what I expected, because this PHY crashes when writing to the MMD
registers (the MMD registers are used otherwise by this PHY).
See also commit 0231b1a074c6 ("net: phy: realtek: Use the dummy
stubs for MMD register access for rtl8211b").

Let's see whether the other affected systems use the same PHY
version.

Heiner