Intel ESB2 problems and their solution

I wanted to circulate a document from our technical marketing group that
details a problem with the family of
adapters called ES2LAN. These are most commonly seen as LOMs (on
motherboard) in SuperMicro and
other servers, the most common device ID is 0x1096 but also may be 0x1098,
0x10BA, or 0x10BB. They
are a device driven by the 'em' driver.

This document has some Windows symptoms that will be of no value here, but
the problem does occur on
FreeBSD, most often it is seen as a failure to load, due to a "Shared Code
Initialization" failure.

There is driver changes in 7.2 that address this problem, however the driver
alone is only part of the
complete solution, you MUST have firmware updates to resolve the problem,
and this document
provides pointers for particular systems.

If you have a system that has seen this issue please obtain and apply the
relevant firmware.

I hope this helps resolve any of these issues customers are still seeing.

Cheers everyone,

Jack Vogel
Intel Lan Access Division
freebsd_at_intel.com