The onboard 1000MBit LAN Card (sky2)

The board features two Marvell 88E8053 Gigabit LAN Controller. Sadly the driver support (sky2) for this NIC is less than ideal at the time of writing.

2.6.18-mm1 is the latest useable kernel for this NIC. With this driver the NIC gets "hung" at random intervals forcing the user to rmmod + modprobe the sky2 module. This happens often enough for me to write a cronjob to restart the dead driver.

Any kernel > 2.6.18-mm1 causes a full machine lock-up when the driver dies. I'm working with Stephen Hemminger to resolve this issue but there is no solution yet.

Summary

At the current state of afairs, most people will be better off disabling both onboard sky2 NICs in the BIOS and using a PCI or PCIe addon card. ^

UPDATE 13-OCT-06: I have pretty much given up with sky2 for now. This driver ruins an otherwise excellent hardware base.

UPDATE 10-APR-07: While the driver still causes problems for many users, there is now a mailinglist for sky4