Why does Realtek keep issuing updates for my network card?

[Dominus Atheos]

Seriously, a new one appears in my windows update list about every month. I can't seem to find anything that might be a changelog on realtek's website. How much updating does a network adapter need? I don't think it's adding any new functionality, and I don't notice my network transfer speed shoot up after installing any of these updates, and there shouldn't be any security issues with a nic card.

Does anyone know what these updates do, or can offer any guesses? It's only an optional update, so I may just start ignoring them if I can't find out what they do.

[Xon]

Bugfixes for silent(and some times not so silent) data corrupt is a fairly common one for anything touching a network stack

[Dominus Atheos]

Well it's been nearly a year since I got this mobo, so has my network traffic been suffering data corruption this whole time?

[Xon]

Quite likely, there was a really semi-random silent data corruption bug with realtek chipset & drivers with tcp offloading. Infact, tcp offloading can cause all types of nasty corruption issues.

It is one reason checksumming everything is such a good idea from end-to-end for IO. Of course that doesn't help when the hardware tcp offloading corrupts the checksum it is to generate.

[Beowulf]

Quite likely, there was a really semi-random silent data corruption bug with realtek chipset & drivers with tcp offloading. Infact, tcp offloading can cause all types of nasty corruption issues.

It is one reason checksumming everything is such a good idea from end-to-end for IO. Of course that doesn't help when the hardware tcp offloading corrupts the checksum it is to generate.

It's likely that it won't corrupt the checksum in such a way that an invalid packet will appear to valid. The net result is that you end up with lower throughput than your network is actually capable of.