Is there an appropriate way to cleanly remove the r8169 driver from my AlmaLinux 9.5 installation, at least until appropriate native support is available for my ethernet device?
I suppose I can continue as I have it currently configured with the r8126 and unused r8169 drivers, but, being somewhat OCD, I would like to know how to ban r8169 from my system entirely right.
Since Almalinux 9.5 r8169 doesn’t support the realtek pci ethernet r8126 (5GiB) device on my new motherboard, I eventually found and installed the r8126 driver from the ELREPO. This finally got my ethernet connection working, so I could actually perform updates, etc. directly. Of course, since there was no ethernet during the 9.5 install from usb, I eventually discovered that the chronyd was not active, so my PC clock was not synced to ntp-time. I eventually discovered that there was a missing symbolic link somewhere which was fixed by disabling and then enabling the chronyd via systemctl command. But the non-functional r8169 still loads and runs and loads in addition to my working r8126 driver. I suspect that is because the r8169 driver is loaded early in the boot process from the initramfs.