Ethernet not working on first cold boot, but does after restart? Anyone else have this problem?

Framework Desktop
1

Hi all,
I’m having a strange issue where the built-in Ethernet on my Framework Desktop almost always appears invisible to the OS when the machine is first powered on.
And I do mean “invisible”: in linux, for example, the output of ‘lspci’ is simply missing two devices until I reboot.

00:02.1 PCI Bridge: [….] Strix Halo GPP Bridge (rev 02) […]
bf:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor co., Ltd RTL8126 5Gbe […]

As soon as I restart the computer, they suddenly appear again and the OS acts like everything is fine. Doesn’t appear to matter how I restart it, as long as I don’t power it off.

Anyway, this is all very weird, and I’m just wondering if anyone else has a similar problem or any idea what might be going on.

I’m pretty confident it’s not an OS problem, since it happens regardless of OS, and of course I’ve tested the officially supported ones.
but to make things even stranger, the ethernet hardware itself also seems to be working ok before the OS tries is booted. The UEFI network stack seems fine - I can boot into a UEFI shell with it enabled and the hardware is visible and works perfectly.

Thanks in advance for any insight (or at least commiseration) any of you can provide.

2

Double check that you are on the latest Realtek drivers. My ethernet connectivity drops randomly too on Windows 11 but I have upgraded since and it seems to be doing better within the last few days.

I will say simply disabling the ethernet and reenabling on Windows works for me. There was one time I had to reboot the machine in order to get connectivity back but that was with the bundled Realtek drivers from Framework which are also very outdated.