A server on new Intel 5000 chipset

Dear Colleagues,

I am going to make a FreeBSD 7.1 or 7.2 server based on Intel 5000 chipset and I need your advice to clear several issues.

Consider, e.g., the S5000VSASCSIR board
(http://serverconfigurator.intel.com/details.aspx?id=1504&ShowNavigation=false)

1) Are the integrated Intel 82563EB Gigabit Ethernet chips supported by either "em" or "igb" drivers?
2) Is the integrated SATA RAID-5 supported FreeBSD somehow or it's better to use a separate, e.g. 3Ware, RAID card?
3) We boot the diskless client machines with a kernel compiled on the server (and mount /usr so that they use the system libraries from the server), thus, I will not be able to use the AMD64 version of FreeBSD on the server. The alternative is to use a kernel with PAE option and the i386 version. So my question is: how nice does a PAE kernel work in general, and how will I be able to run applications that need "linux_base" (as PAE kernel does not allow to load modules)?

Many thanks in advance,
Yours,
Alexandre.
 
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