When you use random PCIe cards it depends on a couple of things, a lot of the more complex cards have an option ROM or general ROM that contains some firmware that is run on the main CPU, but it's firmware for x86 ... so the card will not initialise. There are some projects out there that try to run the option firmware during boot with emulation, but that's very experimental. For some cards, there is actually ARM firmware you can update from the vendor, but I have only seen that for expensive 10 and 40Gbit NICs.
edit: https://www.suse.com/c/revolutionizing-a...m-aarch64/
edit: https://www.suse.com/c/revolutionizing-a...m-aarch64/
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