It looks like the Intel out-of-tree driver is carrying around some legacy HAVE_PAGE_COUNT_BULK_UPDATE option that is making their porting efforts difficult.
This commit in upstream ends up getting split in half:
--- if (unlikely(!pagecnt_bias)) {
+++ if (unlikely(pagecnt_bias == 1)) {
Best thing I can find in i40e_txrx.c where a single patch in Linux upstream got split across 2.13.10 and 2.14.13. Not a smoking gun exactly, still some exercise left for the reader.