I have a Dell Optiplex 9020 with an Intel i7-4790 processor and 32GB RAM. It is set up with dual-boot Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise and Ubuntu 16.04 Linux.
If I start from power-down and boot into Linux, the I217-LM Ethernet chip works fine. Same if I boot Windows. But if I have booted into Windows and then reboot into Linux without powering-down, the Ethernet does not work. Linux is never able to connect to the network and get an IP address by using DHCP. In the upper-right corner of the screen there is an icon which spins around, showing that it is trying to connect. If I give the command "sudo dhclient -v eno1", I get this output:
Listening on LPF/eno1/98:90:96:db:2b:49
Sending on LPF/eno1/98:90:96:db:2b:49
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on eno1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 3 (xid=0xaeaac17)
DHCPDISCOVER on eno1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 4 (xid=0xaeaac17)
This repeats until I type ctrl-C to kill the program.
If I reboot into Windows, the Ethernet works again. So it appears to me that at boot the Linux driver is not properly resetting the chip if it has already been used, but powering down does reset it. And, the Windows driver seems to set the chip correctly.
This problem occurred with the version 3.3.2 e1000e driver which came with Ubuntu. I downloaded and installed 3.3.4 from the Intel Web site, and it has the same problem. I did some Googling and it appears that others have seen this behavior for a while, but I don't know if it has ever been reported to Intel.
Thanks for looking into this.