I am including Karsten's response for the record here.  I sent him some
additional info (recorded above), but have not heard back.

Hi Mark,

Am 03.11.2012 03:05, schrieb Mark Bidewell:
> I have a DP35DP mainboard with the 82566DC-2 onboard NIC.  I installed
> Ubuntu 12.04 with Kernel 3.2.  At some point in that series, the NIC
> stopped being recognized (eth0 would show no such device) moving to
> earlier or later versions did not solve the issue.  I am trying to
> determine if this is just a HW failure or if the EEPROM bug from
> 2.6.27 could have resurfaced.

Hmm, I do not think so, but it could be related.
The bug with 2.6.27 was not a single bug it was a combination of
different issues.

1. The BIOS area holding the e1000e firmware und PCI settings was not
write protected
2. A BUG in combination with a race condition in some kernel component
did caused writes to random memory location.
3. If the write did happen on the BIOS flash control area it did cause
an erase of the e1000e BIOS section, on the next reboot the card was not
longer detected by the system, because the PCI IDs of the device were
set to 0:0 .

This was fixed by several changes, so for example the e1000e driver now
does set bits which do write protect the firmware until next power
cycle. (And at least the race condition/random memory write BUG was
fixed as well.

So it would be from interest, if lspci -v still show the device, if
it is in the failure mode.

> The symptoms are different but what
> makes me suspicious that this could be an EEPROM issue is that if the
> BIOS Setup is accessed (even if no changes are made) the card will
> work flawlessly until the system is powered off for 5-10 minutes.

Hmm, I would suggest the check the RTC/NVRAM mainboard battery and
replace it (usually a 3V 2032 Lithium cell).

>
> Do you think this could be an EEPROM problem?
>

I cannot rule out that the EEProm was damaged. So far I remember
here were 2 copies of this area, so maybe one got corrupted and
if you go via BIOS setup the other area is used. Which area is in used
maybe is saved in the BIOS NV data, so if the battery is weak it could
be lost this data.

Best Regards

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Title:
  8086:294c Intel NIC driver e1000e not claiming HW

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