e1000e

e1000e is a Linux kernel device driver for Intel PRO/1000 PCI Express Ethernet adapters. It provides support for a wide range of Intel PCIe Gigabit Ethernet controllers and is part of the Linux networking stack. The driver is maintained within the Linux kernel and is typically distributed with most Linux distributions. It is loaded as the module named e1000e and can be configured at boot or loaded manually with modprobe.

The driver offers a range of features common to Intel PRO/1000 PCIe devices. It supports MSI and MSI-X interrupt delivery, multiqueue networking with receive-side scaling (RSS), and various hardware offloads such as checksum offload, TCP segmentation offload (TSO), and large receive offload (LRO). VLAN tag offload and wake-on-LAN are supported, along with standard link state management and automatic speed/duplex negotiation. The implementation uses NAPI to improve throughput under load and to reduce interrupt overhead on busy networks.

In use, the e1000e driver works with standard Linux networking tools. Network interfaces managed by e1000e can be configured with ip or ifconfig, and ethtool can be used to view and modify driver and device settings, including offloads and wake-on-LAN options.

Limitations and notes often depend on the specific hardware revision and kernel version. Some newer Intel adapters may require a newer kernel or firmware to access the full feature set. As with many Linux drivers, ongoing maintenance and bug fixes come from the kernel community with collaboration from Intel.