Originally posted by: drag
There definately are drivers aviable... the company that makes the cards, or at least a company that sells the cards GPL'd them themselves.
The trouble is that they are very new...
The drivers for the PCI-based marvel cards are supported by the kernel proper, but the deal is that he isn't using a onboard PCI gigabit nic card... he is using a PCI-Express gigabyte nic card, which is a different marvel card that requires different drivers.
They are refered sometimes as the 'Yukon' and then the Yukon-II or Yukon 2 or whatever is the PCI-e card.
The drivers are aviable for them from the site I linked to earlier.
The trouble with those is that it's a bit of a programming kludge.. they shoehorned 2 drivers (the PCI versions and the PCI-e version) into one big thing.
The are undergoing a small rewrite to seperate the code and get support into the kernel proper. Once that is done then they will be supported by default on everything.
I suggest getting a cheap nic card for now because he is a newbie and downloading and compiling a driver may not be the easiest thing to do right now. Once he gets it all sorted out then he'll be able to do compile the drivers himself, although by that time it may be easier to get support by doing a kernel update.
Part of the code base has been added to 2.6.12 kernels for support of the Yukon series cards.. That's the skge driver.. Eventually the Yukon-II cards will be supported to, maybe with the 2.6.13 or 2.6.14 if we are lucky.
Since it's a PCI-e it should be VERY nice. I wish I had one.