Re: [PATCH net-next 3/3] r8169: release firmware on application failure

If the firmware cannot be written, is the device dead? Should this
return an error, so the caller can abort the probe?

A timeout while applying firmware could indeed indicate a PHY access
problem. However, firmware loading failures are already non-fatal,
and the callers of r8169_apply_firmware() do not propagate errors
either. Making firmware application failures fatal would require
broader changes to several r8169 PHY initialization paths.