2011/3/25 Andy Gospodarek <gospo@redhat.com>
[...]
Your devices are not showing up because the driver is failing to load.

That is one strange thing, modprobe didn't report any error and you can see the driver in the lsmod list.
 
Erroe -15 is IXGBE_ERR_RESET_FAILED, so it seems there is either
something wrong with your cards of you are hitting a driver bug.

From time to time the card come up (after changes in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-*net*) and I get errors like:

[  234.127257] ixgbe: eth2: ixgbe_disable_rx_queue: RXDCTL.ENABLE on Rx queue 0 not cleared within the polling period
[  234.132529] ixgbe: eth2: ixgbe_disable_rx_queue: RXDCTL.ENABLE on Rx queue 1 not cleared within the polling period
[  234.136400] ixgbe: eth2: ixgbe_disable_rx_queue: RXDCTL.ENABLE on Rx queue 2 not cleared within the polling period
[  234.140396] ixgbe: eth2: ixgbe_disable_rx_queue: RXDCTL.ENABLE on Rx queue 3 not cleared within the polling period
[  234.144402] ixgbe: eth2: ixgbe_disable_rx_queue: RXDCTL.ENABLE on Rx queue 4 not cleared within the polling period
[  234.148405] ixgbe: eth2: ixgbe_disable_rx_queue: RXDCTL.ENABLE on Rx queue 5 not cleared within the polling period
[  234.152408] ixgbe: eth2: ixgbe_disable_rx_queue: RXDCTL.ENABLE on Rx queue 6 not cleared within the polling period
[  234.156408] ixgbe: eth2: ixgbe_disable_rx_queue: RXDCTL.ENABLE on Rx queue 7 not cleared within the polling period
[  234.212147] ixgbe: eth2: ixgbe_watchdog_link_is_up: NIC Link is Up 10 Gbps, Flow Control: RX/TX

When I try to set an IP adress.


 You should probably turn on dynamic debugging for the ixgbe module and
see if you can figure out what might be going wrong.  A guide for using
dynamic debugging can be found in Documentation/dynamic-debug-howto.txt.

I'm already struggeling with the debugfs, sorry but I need a documentation that a system administrator can understand :).

One remark, the error occured with the standard ixgbe module (2.0.62-k2), so I upgraded the module to the latest version (3.2.10-NAPI) but still have the same error.

Regards, Thomas