> It's my experience that the way dhclient treats the interface
(repeatedly
> configuring it down and up, which causes a reset on many interfaces)
plays
> *very* poorly with a large number of gigabit devices.  I've seen it
hang
> old Tigon cards so hard that a power-cycle was required in order to
get
> them back into a working state, and I would not be surprised to see it
> do something similar with the bge.  I've also seen it get Intel cards
stuck
> in a state in which they always mis-negotiate the duplex.
> 
> Adding appropriate media options to your dhclient configuration, for
> example 'medium "media 1000baseT-FDX ip4csum udp4csum tcp4csum"' *and*
> increasing the dhclient retry interval, which will keep it from
resetting
> the interface hardware so often, may help.
> 
> I've long noticed that the first packet dhclient sends on my NetBSD
> systems, regardless of interface hardware type, always seems to be
lost,
> so it always retries at least once, resetting the interface in the
> process.  This isn't a good thing, either, but I've never figured out
> why it happens.

I went ahead and manually set all of the media options and such for the
interface as well as manually setting the IP address. It did not make
any difference. I was unable to get bge0 to access anything when it was
in 1000baseT mode. It would not even ping anything else.

That is interesting about the first dhcp request being lost. That has
not been my experience at all with any of my machines. One request and
one reply is all I get.

I have not had any problems using gigabit with an Intel PRO/1000 T
gigabit interface which is supported by the wm(4) driver. It works with
dhclient with no problems. Thank you for the suggestions.

Bryan