NIC Questions for 6.1 Release

[Chris]

I've had nightmares with my AMD65 Tyan quad that were most likely  
caused by the Broadcom built-in NICs. There are a lot of folks who've  
reported problems not only on FreeBSD, but also Windows and Linux.  
The issues seem to be negotiation problems and then packet loss if  
negotiation is disabled. I found that if you include a bad cable in  
the mix, FreeBSD 6.0 STABLE gave unannounced hard hangs and FreeBSD  
6.1 RELEASE would panic. With the cable replaced, the system finally  
stayed up but I found that it would just tend to drop off the net  
occasionally for a few seconds here and there. Too often to really be  
usable.

I'm bringing that server back in to rebuild it on p6 in hopes of  
getting it stable enough to finally go into production. I have to  
verify that the bge driver problems have been fixed since the May  
release (if they are fixable) but have been unable to determine if  
changes have been made. Is there any single source where one can go  
to see what has been changed on the various components of the OS. The  
notes, errata, hardware.txt, UPDATING, and many other normal places  
one looks doesn't really provide this this level of detail. I can  
research if someone has an idea where you would research? On the  
other hand, any of you have inside information on the broadcom  
itself, is it hopeless, and would going to the Intel PRO/1000 MT fix  
my problems with more surety?

These are coming out of the boot as:
bge0: <Broadcom BCM5704C Dual Gigabit Ethernet, ASIC rev. 0x2003>
The computer is a Tyan s4884 quad opteron (duals).

Thanks,
Chris