I am on a laptop with an ethernet card listed as

Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 12)

by `lspci -k` (module in use: r8169).

I am currently running the latest 4.16 at the time of this writing
(Thursday, Apr 12 2018) compiled from Linus' repo (.config attached).

Issue I am experiencing: upon boot-up with an ethernet cable already
plugged in a substantial amount of time passes between the card's
acquisition of an ip address and actually achieving connectivity (as
tested by pinging google.com).

A connection is eventually established, and so far it doesn't seem to
be dropping. The initial waiting time however is much longer than
usual (minutes).

The problem was not manifesting with an earlier version of 4.16
(compiled a few days ago).

I am attaching the output of dmesg; there is a trace at the end, in
between two lines reading

r8169 0000:03:00.1 enp3s0f1: link up

I've tested repeatedly, booting earlier kernels with no issue, and the
present one, even with some variation of .config files. The problem is
consistently reproducible.

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Thank you