26.1 upgrade chaos, Realtek unusable, critical packages removed/disabled

[nero355]

RTL8111E

AFAIK that's a very old RealTek NIC Chip used as Onboard NIC for a lot of devices and might be declared as EOL by the people who build the FreeBSD Kernel so you could check that and see if there is a solution available for those who want to use it anyway ?

[drosophila]

I seem to remember that both my NICs also are RE8111E, but I can't physically look at them ATM. Maybe you could do a "pciconf -lvvv" on the console and see what it says and compare it to mine:

re0@pci0:3:0:0:    class=0x020000 rev=0x01 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x10ec device=0x8168 subvendor=0x10ec subdevice=0x8168
    vendor     = 'Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.'
    device     = 'RTL8111/8168/8211/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet
re1@pci0:4:0:0:    class=0x020000 rev=0x11 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x10ec device=0x8168 subvendor=0x1849 subdevice=0x8168
    vendor     = 'Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.'
    device     = 'RTL8111/8168/8211/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet

As you can see from the revision, the re0 is quite ancient (compared to the re1 that also is over a decade old; the manual claims it is a RTL8111GR though, so not RTL8111E). The vendor driver has recently ceased to support the RTL84xx chips, but that version is only in the 26.7 so that shouldn't be your issue (the above output is from 26.1.11_10, with the realtek vendor driver that obviously still supports the 84xx).