[sofixa]

It was the same with Intel's drivers. We had the same issues happen on ESXi servers with X710 NICs, with VMware's repackaged and then Intel's original i40e driver, and it worked terribly, either kernel panicking or just freezing the NICs. It was a fun one to debug, but thankfully we only had to wait a few months ( the issue was known for a year) for Intel to come up with the fixed driver.

The bastards at VMware kept the buggy driver on their hardware compatibility list and kept shipping it for multiple versions probably a year later.

[SteveNuts]

Was the ixgbe driver not available?

[sofixa]

IIRC the options were i40e and i40en, the latter resulting in daily crashes, so i40e it was :)