ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2 linux compatibility
 

I'm very interested in this newly released motherboard. Board is based on the Uli M1695 and M1697 chipsets. Meets all of my needs and fits the bill nicely at about US$85. I have 2 major concerns, however, regarding its compatibility with Linux, before making the move to buy this board.

1. Onboard gigabit LAN - it is based on the Realtek RTL8111B PCI-E chipset. I'm wondering if it is supported in the latest 2.6.x kernels. There appears to be a driver available on Realtek's website so I'm not too concerned about this one.

2. Onboard SATA - it is provided by the Uli M1697 chipset. I was not able to find any information on whether this chipset will work with linux at all. No linux driver is provided on the Uli website, and google did not provide any useful results. Getting SATA to work is critical for my purposes as I'm trying to migrate a 4 drive linux software RAID5 SATA array to this motherboard.

Would appreciate if someone can provide any information on the two pieces above. Thanks.

1. That ULI chipset is supported by Linux.
2. Realtek LAN is supported by Linux.
3. Should work, too.

I had a look the the 2.6.15-r7 kernel of Gentoo Linux 2006.0