I use a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard with onboard Realtek RTL8111C (pci -v see attachment). The io-net driver devn
-rtl8169.so starts with following error message: unable to init dll devn-rtl8169: No such device

# sloginfo
Jul 23 13:40:05    2    10     0 rtl8169: TBI mode not yet supported
Jul 23 13:40:05    2    10     0 devn-rtl8169: Failure, unable to detectMII (PHY) Interface.
Jul 23 13:40:05    2    10     0 devn-rtl8169: Failed rtl_hw_config().
Jul 23 13:40:05    2    10     0 devn-rtl8169: rtl_create_instance() failed for scanned vid: 0x10ec did: 0x8168 idx: 0x0

Jul 23 13:40:05    5    14     0 tcpip starting
Jul 23 13:40:05    3    14     0 Using pseudo random generator.  See "random" option

But the driver works if I plug off the ethernet cable:

# sloginfo
Jul 28 14:54:24    5    10     0 rtl_FindPHY(): an_capable 0x8, force_advertise -1, media_rate -1, duplex -1
Jul 28 14:54:24    6    10     0 tcrval 3c000000
Jul 28 14:54:24    5    14     0 tcpip starting
Jul 28 14:54:24    3    14     0 Using pseudo random generator. See "random" option

The driver works too with another motherboard and RTL8111B.