Comment 8 for bug 194832

I can confirm this behavior in both gutsy i386 and AMD64 as well as hardy alpha5 i386.

Compiling driver version 7.6.15 seems to fix the pulsing on my setup, although I have a Intel 82566DM-2 which is different than the original poster.

lshw -class network:
  *-network
       description: Ethernet interface
       product: 82566DM-2 Gigabit Network Connection
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 19
       bus info: pci@0000:00:19.0
       logical name: eth0
       version: 02

       size: 1GB/s
       capacity: 1GB/s
       width: 32 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation
       configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=e1000 driverversion=7.6.15.4-NAPI duplex=full firmware=1.4-0 latency=0 link=yes module=e1000 multicast=yes port=twisted pair speed=1GB/s

ifconfig:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet
            Mask:255.255.255.0
           Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
          RX packets:3833 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:2077 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:2163120 (2.0 MB) TX bytes:344750 (336.6 KB)

uname -a:
Linux 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 02:46:46 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux