PCI-E Card Description Says Linux Compatible, But No Linux Drivers Provided

Y'all,

For a bit of background, what appears to be a motherboard failure on my Dell E521 running LinuxCNC 2.7 is forcing me to change to a "new" machine (Dell XPS 8500), and I'll be upgrading to 2.8.4.  The former machine uses PCI cards, whereas the latter machine uses PCI-E cards, so the plug-and-play (i.e. didn't require any drivers) Syba SD-PCI-1P DB25 parallel card in the former cannot be used in the latter.

Looking at various cards, the description of the Syba/IOCrest SI-PEX10011 includes "Linux Kernel 2.6.15 and later," but there are no Linux drivers on the "download" page.  Other cards by Syba and other manufacturers show Linux driver downloads.  I've got a query into Syba about this particular omission, but in general, are drivers needed for PCI-E parallel cards with LinuxCNC?

Thanks in advance for assistance on what might be a rather noobish question, but I am indeed a relative noob to Linux, even though I've been successfully using LinuxCNC for 6+ years!

- Scrappy

Some PCIe chips follow the PCI enumeration protocol to be set up as a standard parallel port by Linux kernels. There are a few crazy oddball devices that do NOT, and can't be used by any standard driver. Downloadable drivers for Linux might be usable for printing on these, but would be NO GOOD at all for use with LinuxCNC, as it does NOT use the system's drivers for the real time control of motion systems.
I have used Syba SD-PEX10005 cards just fine in a number of Dell machines, but did have an issue in an Optiplex 7010 machine. There may have been a BIOS issue on that one. I have used a BUNCH of Optiplex models in the past, but most were PCI rather than PCIe. I also have used the Optiplex 980 (that's the last model with a built-in parallel port).
Just to clarify, LinuxCNC provides built-in drivers for (standard) parallel ports in several drivers such as hal_ppmc and Mesa's hostmot.

Jon

Thanks, Jon -- that's just the kind of stuff I needed to know.