She looked one more time at the output of lspci . The device was still just a line of hexadecimal. But now, she had looked inside. And it made sense.
cd /usr/src/linux/drivers/net/ethernet/realtek/ driver for pci device
vim r8169_main.c
The system exhaled a stream of hex and status flags. There it was: "Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411." But Elara didn't trust the name. Names were for users. She was after the soul of the thing. She looked one more time at the output of lspci
She scrolled to the hardware initialization routine. A massive switch statement based on the MAC version. For VER_52, the driver wrote a strange sequence of magic values to undocumented PCI configuration registers: driver for pci device