Issue with RTL8111 NIC after upgrade to kernel 4.19

[Norbert Jurkeit]

Dear Linux developers,

after upgrade from distro kernel 4.18.18 to 4.19.2 some Fedora users 
(including me) encounter issues with RTL8111 based Ethernet interfaces. 
The interface is not started correctly after boot with kernel 4.19.2 
(i.e. is reported by ifconfig as up, but not running, the LEDs besides 
the connector stay off and no data is transferred).

At least for me the issue seems to occur only after reboot from a 
previous session with kernel 4.18.18, but not after power-on, which 
means the hardware is not fully initialized by the new r8169 driver. 
Marc Dionne, another affected Fedora user, thinks that module "realtek" 
needs to be loaded, which does not happen automatically. Please see 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1650984 for more details.

As Fedora kernel maintainers usually don't apply many changes to the 
upstream kernel, users of other distros will likely be affected as well. 
We therefore kindly ask you to investigate the issue and fix it in 
future upstream kernels.

Many thanks and best regards,

Norbert Jurkeit