Hello, I ran into some trouble about an hour ago…
My workstation has an onboard Realtek Ethernet which only works with the r8168 driver. Unfortunately, this driver is not in the kernel, but available to be compiled as a kernel module. (I guess because of som patents) That worked for quite some time, until i thought "hey, you got an hour of time, your workstation is still on 3.7.4, why don't you just upgrade it to 3.8.2?" So I did, only to find out that Linus and his friends changed the way drivers are initialized… (__devinit got unsupported for example) Of course, the guys who wrote that r8169 have not changed their code yet. tl;dr: My network is broken since 3.8.0. So for an immediate fix I am emerging 3.7.10 (since emerge --depclean deleted the Kernel source when it found the source fo 3.7.8 which got removed as soon as 3.8.2 was emerged…) to get it working again. For the long run im thinking of buying a PCI(e) card with Kernel support. Or maybe, if I find some time I will fix the driver myself. My question now is: Who should I talk to so something like this does not happen again? A certain gentoo dev, who could issue warnings on emerging kernels, something like excerpts from the changelog? Myself, because I missed what I described above? The devs of the r8169? Linus & co for breaking things? Myself bcause I forgot something else? Realtek? Or someone completely different? --
