The upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle will be adding support for Intel Killer E5000 Ethernet.

While Intel is typically very good with getting their hardware support upstreamed into the Linux kernel well in advance of products becoming available, there are occasionally exceptions and the Intel Killer E5000 support appears to be one of those incidents. Intel Killer E5000 Ethernet is appearing in some modern laptops/systems but only with the upcoming Linux 6.15 cycle will there be hardware support.

There's been [1]questions raised by Intel customers within the Intel Community forums around Killer E5000 Linux support to which a month later was a non-answer from Intel customer support. But from my monitoring of "-next" branches, it turns out Intel Killer E5000 support is queued up in net-next ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window opening in late March.

What makes this tardy Intel hardware support a bit more surprising is... The Intel Killer E5000 turns out to be just a re-branded Realtek RTL8126 5GbE Ethernet adapter.

[2]This patch adding the Intel Killer E5000 support is just a one-liner adding the Realtek 0x5000 PCI device ID to the R8169 network driver. That one line of code is all that should be needed for getting the Intel Killer E5000 networking on Linux.



[1] https://community.intel.com/t5/Wireless/Killer-E5000-Linux-Drivers/m-p/1655447

[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/netdev/net-next.git/commit/?id=d30460f42675fef5cd4b44ffbc49b545524555e3