Are there Linux drivers for "Killer NIC E2200" (or others)?

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
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Just curious. Seems like many Skylake Z170 boards are coming with "Killer NIC". I run Linux Mint on my main box these days. Would like to be able to upgrade to SKL, but if the onboard NIC won't work, then I'll skip it.

Currently on a Gigabyte GA-H81M-DS2V v1.0 board, with a G3258. Linux Mint finds the onboard LAN and uses it just fine. (I think it's the ubiquitous RealTek, which is perfectly fine with me.)
 

matricks

Member
Nov 19, 2014
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The Killer E2xxx NICs are supported by the alx Linux driver. It is part of the mainline kernel since Linux 3.10, so any distro using kernel 3.10 or later should support it out of the box.
 

mv2devnull

Golden Member
Apr 13, 2010
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The first question is, what is the "E2200" physically. Atheros?
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/t...2200-nic-into-qualcomm-atheros-ar8161.198899/

The next question is, are there drivers for that family?
https://wiki.debian.org/alx

If the first two aren't showstoppers, then I presume that Mint can be lucky.


It is indeed an "interesting experiment" to install distro and then find that the included drivers almost, but not quite support the NIC chip and then seek, "download" and compile a better kernel module.


One should be able to use

lspci -nn | grep -i net

to get the [vendor:device] ID pair of your NIC. The kernel modules have a list of ID's that they do support and those can usually be searched online. Obviously the lspci requires that one already has the hardware ...
 

VirtualLarry

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Aug 25, 2001
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The Killer E2xxx NICs are supported by the alx Linux driver. It is part of the mainline kernel since Linux 3.10, so any distro using kernel 3.10 or later should support it out of the box.

Good to hear, thanks. So perhaps I don't have to fear getting a Skylake rig with a Z170 board with a "Killer NIC".