i225 is just broken but I get excellent performance from i210. 1gb is hardly challenging on a contemporaneous CPU, and the i210 offers 4 queues. What's your beef with i210?
https://www.google.com/search?q=i210+proxmox+e1000e+disable
Most people don’t really use their NICs “all the time” “with many hosts.” The i210 in particular will hang after a few months of e.g. etcd cluster traffic on 9th and 10th gen Intel, which is common for SFFPCs.
On Windows, the ndis driver works a lot better. Many disconnects in similar traffic load as Linux, and features like receive side coalescing are broken. They also don’t provide proper INFs for Windows server editions, just because.
I assume Intel does all of this on purpose. I don’t think their functionally equivalent server SKUs are this broken.
Apparently the 10Gig patents are expiring very soon. That will make Realtek, Broadcom and Aquantia’s chips a lot cheaper. IMO, motherboards should be much smaller, shipping with BMC and way more rational IO: SFP+, 22110, Oculink, U.2, and PCIe spaced for Infinity Fabric & NVLink. Everyone should be using LVFS for firmware - NVMe firmware, despite being standardized to update, is a complete mess with bugs on every major controller.
I share all of this as someone with experience in operating commodity hardware at scale. People are so wasteful with their hardware.
Many systems which cost more than a good car are still coming with the Broadcom 5719 (tg3) from 1999. They have a single transmit queue and the driver is full of workarounds. It's a complete joke these are still supplied today.
SFP would be great but I'd settle for an onboard NIC chipset which was made in the last 10 years.
The PTP timestamps would arrive as a separate DMA transaction after the packet DMA transaction. It very possibly could have been poor integration into the ARM SOC, but your PTP-specific issue on x86 makes me wonder.