What to do about Realtek RTL8125 RTL8126 RTL8127 drivers

Andrew

@olivierlambert Realtek has released three related ethernet PCI chips: RTL8125 (2.5G), RTL8126 (5G), RTL8127 (10G).

Realtek started with a single driver that supported the 8125 and 8126 as they are closely related. The current XCP driver is based on that single set of code. Now they have split the code into three different drivers.

The problem is they have released new versions of the RTL8125 that require new driver code to work. This already caused problem in the mainline upstream Linux and required updates to the kernel driver (early 2025) and at least one XCP user has hit this problem on a desktop board. Since XCP is using the vendor driver, the question is what to do next:

Do nothing and let people use other ethernets
Make a new alt-driver for only the 8125 chip (no 8126 support), leave the old 8125 driver alone (maybe for 8.2?)
Use the new Realtek 8125 code and add new drivers for the 8126 and 8127 (maybe for 8.3?)
???

The path forward could be different for XCP 8.3 vs. 8.2.1 ...