Solaris releases before Solaris 10 1/06, including Solaris 9, Solaris 10 1/05 (GA), and Solaris 10 3/05 (HW2), are unable to communicate through the Intel E1000 card. The Solaris e1000g driver does not enable PCI bus mastering for the network adapter and is therefore unable to send and receive data. This problem appears to be specific to the e1000g driver and does not reflect general Solaris driver behavior.

The AMD PCnet emulation (using the Solaris pcn driver) can be used instead of Intel E1000. Solaris 10 1/06 (U1) and later releases do not have this problem and work with the emulated E1000 ethernet controller.