Amston Lake / Alder Lake-N (Atom x7433RE) with IgH EtherCAT — kernel version exp

Hello all,I'm specifying the controller for LinuxCNC as EtherCAT master via IgH/EtherLab, CiA 402 servo drives, 1 kHz servo loop.. Two industrial box PCs are shortlisted, both built on Intel Atom x7433RE (Amston Lake / Alder Lake-N):

• ASRock Industrial iEP-5020G — 2 × i210-IT + 1 × i226-IT
• IBASE AGS104T — 2 × i226-IT

One of the vendors has just told me that Intel specifies kernel 6.18 or later for the Amston Lake platform, and points at Intel's RT kernel overlay (linux-image-6.18rt-intel) which targets Ubuntu. Debian 13 ships 6.12, and as far as I can tell so does the LinuxCNC Debian 13 PREEMPT_RT ISO. Before I commit to hardware I'd rather learn from people who've actually done this than find out on the bench.Questions:

1. Is anyone running LinuxCNC + IgH EtherCAT on Amston Lake or Alder Lake-N (x7433RE, x7835RE, N97, N100, N150)? Which distro and kernel?
2. Does the "6.18 or later" requirement actually bite on a 6.12 RT kernel, or is the gap mainly graphics/TCC/TSN enablement rather than boot, Ethernet and serial? I'd expect the i210/i226 drivers to be long-since mainline, but I don't want to assume.
3. IgH native NIC drivers vs generic — On a recent kernel, do ec_igb / ec_e1000e still build, or are people falling back to the generic driver? If generic, what did it cost in worst-case jitter?
4. i210-IT vs i226-IT for the master port. I've seen the i210 preferred here for worst-case timing. With both available on the same box, is that still the recommendation, or has the i226 situation improved?
5. Real latency numbers welcome — latency-histogram max on the servo thread, under load, at 1 kHz, on any Alder Lake-N class machine.
6. If you did run a newer RT kernel on Debian, did you build it yourself or use a repo, and did anything in the LinuxCNC/IgH build need patching?

I'll post my own results back here once hardware is on the bench — latency histograms, IgH timing, and whatever I learn about the kernel question — in case it's useful to the next person choosing one of these boxes.

I'll be honest, AI is helping me build this machine. I am not as knowledgeable as this post makes me seem - but please dont hold that against me.  I really would like some assistance rather than spending hours on a new machine only to find out it won't work for me.

Some general information:
The RT kernel in Debian has a linux base, initramfs-tools, and kmod dependencies, all in appropriate versions. These dependencies have their dependencies, etc.
This means you can install a foreign kernel package, but something may work incorrectly or be unstable.
If sources are available, a better solution is to compile a new kernel, although this may not be possible, due a other causes...
6.18 itself shouldn't be a problem, because Trixie has kernel 7.1 in the backports, so you can try.

Thanks — that's very helpful. Agreed on not mixing Intel's Ubuntu-built package into Debian; "installs but might be subtly unstable" is the worst case for a machine running multi-day jobs. I hadn't understood backports were already that far ahead. linux-image-rt-amd64 is there, so I'll stay on Debian 13 and take the kernel from backports.

That moves questions elsewhere:

Does the IgH master still build its native NIC drivers on a 6.18 or 7.x kernel? ec_igb and ec_e1000e are patched against specific kernel versions and have historically lagged mainline.

Do the native drivers still compile on a recent backports kernel, or is everyone on the generic driver now?
If generic — what does it cost in worst-case jitter at 1 kHz? and is generic-driver EtherCAT running in production machines, or is it considered bench-only?

Anyone here Amston Lake / Alder Lake-N (x7433RE, N97, N100) with LinuxCNC?