[E1000-devel] link loss with Intel I340-T4 and CentOS 6.2

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Hi gang,

I'm writing to you with a very odd problem that I've been unable to
resolve.

I have a machine (SuperMicro H8SCM, AMD Opteron) with an I340-T4 PCIe
NIC connected.  I'm running CentOS 6.2 with the latest updated kernel.
 There's a single cable connecting the first port on the card to a switch.

When the machine POST's, the link light is on.  Even at the GRUB menu,
the link light is still on.  However, as soon as the kernel begins to
load, the link light disappears until I reboot.  Even rmmod'ing the
driver won't bring it back.

At first I thought it was a hardware problem.  So I swapped it out
with the other one I had.  (I bought two.)  Same issue.   Then I tried
a Fedora 16 live CD.  And everything "just worked."

FWIW, Ubuntu 10.04.4 has the same issue when I tested it.

So at this point, I know my hardware and network configuration are good.

What I can't figure out, is why the igb driver initializes perfectly,
but the link light never turns on?  I managed to get the link light up
in CentOS ONCE and ONLY once, via some combination of rmmod/modprobe
WRT the igb and e1000e driver.

This motherboard also has two Intel 82574L onboard using e1000e.
Sadly, I can't disable them in the BIOS, as far as I can tell.

I reached out to #centos on freenode after struggling for weeks on my
own with this problem.  no resolution was forthcoming.

I've also tried the following things, and they produced no results:

1) blacklisting the e1000e module and running just igb.
2) using IntMode=0,0,0,0 for igb
3) statically assigning aliases in modprobe.conf
4) Upgrading to the latest e1000e and igb drivers using elrepo.org RPM's.

There are more items, but they were all basic variants of the above.

At any rate, I was wondering if anyone here had any insight into the
matter?

Thanks,

- -- Nick
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