Intel 82572GI PCIe question

[Cheng Jin]

Hi,
 
Has anyone had experience playing with the 82572GI PCIe cards under FreeBSD?
 
We had bunch of cards from two vendors, a few server adapter cards, but most of them
client adapter cards (http://www.intel.com/network/connectivity/products/prodbrf/pro1000_pt_desktop_adapter.pdf)
 
They all had problems (hard to pin down the exact problem, but i suspect auto-negotiation) under FreeBSD 5.4.  We are using the em-5.1.5 driver from Intel's
website that is meant for FreeBSD 5.x, and the cards are all recognized on boot, and if I assign an IP, it appears to work (at least i could ping the machine's own IP).  However,
when they are connected to the rest of the network via 100Mbps switches, they are not
able to ping any host on the network.  
 
Sometimes, i could get the cards to work by plugging them into a different 100Mbps port and then back to the original port, and I also found that if i have a gigabit port handy, i could connect the adapter to the GigE, and then connecting to the 100Mbps would work.
 
The strange and not so funny thing is that a few cards have no problems, but most of have this problem.  I cannot quite tell whether i have a bunch of defective cards (I guess I should test it under Windows), or maybe the 5.x driver doesnt support these PCIe cards very well.
 
One thing I did that might shed some light is that I backed ported some stuff from 6.2 em driver, and that really eliminated the trouble that I was having. If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to post the code I backported.
 
Thanks,
 
Cheng