LinuxQuestions.org - statically link a network card driver into kernel

hi

I got a r8169 chip set network card running on SuSE 7.3 as a module.
The manufacturer (http://www.surecom.com.tw) supplied the Linux driver on the floppy. WOW!

the following tweak doubled the performance :-)

Code:

/* max supported gigabit ethernet frame size -- must be at least (dev->mtu+14+4).*/

#define MAX_ETH_FRAME_SIZE      8000

/* #define MAX_ETH_FRAME_SIZE  1536 */

Next thing I want to do is to statically link the driver into the kernel. The aim is to make a diskless netboot kernel with mknbi.

Theoretically, it is possible to load the module using an initrd, but I think statically linking is easier to do.
I had a look at drivers/net/Makefile and Config.in, but it is not straight-forward to me how to tweak them to compile r8169.c into the kernel.

Any suggestions to find the easiest way?