On Intel Lion systems, all BIOS versions <= 1063 at least, Linux cannot communicate via the on-board Intel NIC if EFI first tried to use the NIC. As ACPI PXE boot is now enabled in the BIOS, a system may try to PXE boot, fail, and then drop to the EFI shell and start Linux. In this case, the NIC driver (e100 or eepro100) loads just fine, but does not work. No data is transmitted or received. Dell developed a 'nicreset.efi' application to reset the NIC prior to starting Linux, which solves this problem. I'm encouraging Dell to release the code under a GPL-compatable license, so that at worst case the Linux distributions may include this app in their loader, and best-case, we can fix the NIC drivers to do this automatically.
Created attachment 5623 [details] nicreset.efi
This defect is considered MUST-FIX for Florence Gold release
a) this is alread fixed in ELI b) it's a firmware bug anyways, that is fixed in recent firmware. I should have closed this a while ago. :)
Agreed, this is fixed in the 12/07 release.