I cannot claim to have dug up the rl.c comment, it was brought to my attention by someone else.
Which, ironically, may have been me. I've actually been aware of that comment for many, many years, dating back to the days that Bill Paul wrote the driver. There was a time, way in the distant past, when one of my companies specialized in outsourced Usenet news service that involved placing gear on-site at the local ISP. Being a renegade startup, not funded by venture capital, we used one of a fairly particular set of inexpensive Gigabyte and Tyan AMD Athlon boards for many of the server nodes, and the Gigabytes almost always had 10/100 Realteks on them. We ran a lot of these until they eventually flamed(!) out, I have several burnt-up Athlon CPU's on display in my office.
If you ever wonder why I seem like a Supermicro fanboi, it's really simple. Switching from Tyan/Gigabyte to Supermicro was a major shift in reliability. It went from systems that burned out in three to five years of 24/7 use, to some low end Supermicros that survived fourteen(?) years in revenue service. Plus the Intel ethernets that just gave you full gigabit all the time anytime you wanted. I eventually gave up on the Antec and AICIPC chassis as well, the Supermicro stuff was a better design and not much pricier.
So I have this very strong association with Realtek being junk. And to a lesser extent, Gigabyte (had a lot of boards fall prey to capacitor plague). I talk about the difference between desktop-grade and gamer-grade systems vs. server-grade boards because I've lived the experience.
I am not really a Supermicro fanboi. However, I strongly appreciate the server-compatible aspects of their ecosystem, and much prefer their lego style model of letting you pick from a wide selection of server-optimized parts to make your own ideal config.
