Comment 3 for bug 56885

mystery solved:

MSI-PCI Interrupts weren't triggered... (/proc/interrupts showed always zero interrupts), and the frame statistics are updated through a kernel-timer-invoked update-function by reading NIC internal registers holding the required statistics data...

by compililing the driver with "make CFLAGS_EXTRA=-DDISABLE_PCI_MSI" and therefore falling back to 'IO-APIC' interrupts, frames started to show up in the network stack :-)

so now it seems to me, that it's just a matter of incomplete/broken MSI support with the involved chipsets... :-/