If you buy a recent USB to Ethernet adapter, embedding a Realtek chip, you possibly face, like me, the following error, when connecting it:
r8152 4-1.1:1.0 (unnamed net_device) (uninitialized): Unknown version 0x6010
r8152 4-1.1:1.0 (unnamed net_device) (uninitialized): Unknown Device
This error is raised because your Linux r8152 driver is too old and doesn’t support your chip’s variant.
In my case, I got the variant 0x6010 which has only been implemented in Linux
4.13, in the commit
65b82d69…d3e7fb976.
As I run at the time a 4.9 kernel and can’t upgrade to a newer release, I backport the commit to the 4.9 branch. You can find the patch I made here. It only adds support for RTL8153B.