Hi:

I'm new to the list but didn't immediately see an answer to this in
quick searches.

Realtek provides several (separated) drivers for their different
chipsets, r8169, r8168, r8101, etc. I see that they are regularly all
merged into the r8169 driver in the kernel.  How come it works this
way?  Is it just because no one ever bothered to do it differently? 
Obviously, they all share a very similar code base so its somewhat
sensible to try to produce a single driver.  I would think it would work
a lot better for everyone if Realtek and the kernel maintainers that
work on the Realtek driver were directly in sync rather than having to
play tag pulling patches from each other's drivers.

Thanks,
-- 
Mario Limonciello
*Dell | Linux Engineering*
mario_limonciello@dell.com