Re: r8169: link up, link down

J. Christopher Pereira [off-list ref] :
[...]

dmesg says "eth0: RTL8110s at 0xffffc2000067ec00, 00:4f:4a:10:1e:cf, XID
04000000 IRQ 16".

It's an old chipset (RTL_GIGA_MAC_VER_03). The PCI remove / rescan trick
may or may not work.

quoted

Building a modern kernel is strongly suggested if the hardware includes a

recent 816x chipset.

Is there any particular patch I could apply and just recompile the driver?

Your kernel is more than three years old. It is not _that_ long but there
are ~182 r8169 patches between v2.6.30 and v3.4. There will still be a lot
even after the trivial ones are factored out.

See git log -p v2.6.30..v3.4 --follow -- drivers/net/ethernet/realtek/r8169.c
for the whole gore.

My hope was to first receive feedback and identify some probably related
known bug, in order to avoid searching for a solution by trial and error or
by updating the whole environment.

You should really try 3.4 and revert 036dafa28da1e2565a8529de2ae663c37b7a0060.
It's the best I can suggest.

-- 
Ueimor