Problems with ixgbe

I'm trying to fire up a couple of 10g cards (2 different cards with 82598 NICs) hooked up back to back, and I'm having nothing but problems. I haven't gotten the latest version 1.5.6 driver to work under any circumstances. I've gotten the 1.2.16 driver that came in 7.0-RELEASE to work once on fresh boots on each machine, but then when rebooting one of the machines nothing could be done to get them to talk again. I did do quite a bit of testing so it doesn't seem that the cards are faulty. Its just wholly unreliable. It seems that they just don't transmit the frames properly. netstat -i shows outgoing packets but internal hw.ix.0.stats show none transmitted when enabled. I've tried disabling MSI-X, using just 1 queue, all with the same result. 

I don't have a 7.1 or 8 machine to test with at this location, so I don't know if there is something in 7.0-RELEASE that just won't work with these cards. I don't want to beat my head too badly, or spend time debugging if its just not going to work. 

First, should 1.5.6 work in 7.0? The README indicates it should. It makes little sense debugging an old driver.


Barney