Intel E810-C drivers

salexandrov · Mar 18, 2024, 3:02 PM

@stephenw10 So I have to wait for CE 2.8.X release which could happen in 3 years from now? Or 2.7.3 could be released earlier? ETA, please? Thank you very much!

stephenw10 · Mar 18, 2024, 3:08 PM

There is no ETA for 2.8 yet. If you upgrade to Plus though 24.03 dev snapshots are available today.

salexandrov · Mar 18, 2024, 3:23 PM

@stephenw10 Well, I currently operate version 2.7.2 CE on my home setup within a virtual machine. Am I understanding correctly that your suggestion entails purchasing a $129 annual subscription for a single kernel module that is already integrated within the FreeBSD distribution, thus available free of charge? I appreciate your clarification on this matter. Thank you kindly for your assistance.

stephenw10 · Mar 18, 2024, 4:07 PM

No I'm saying if you need that today it is available in Plus snapshots. I wouldn't expect a 24.03 kernel module to load in 2.7.2, the kernels are too different.

salexandrov · Mar 18, 2024, 5:03 PM

@stephenw10 Appreciate your reply. Both current 23.09.01 PLUS and 2.7.2 CE are based on FreeBSD 14-CURRENT, successor of FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE, which has ICE kernel modules "by default":

freebsd-version

14.0-RELEASE

ls -la /boot/kernel/ | grep ice

-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 705088 Feb 18 12:18 ice_ddp.ko
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 19136 Nov 10 04:02 icee.ko
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 607432 Feb 18 12:18 if_ice.ko
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 39352 Nov 10 04:03 ng_device.ko

What was the reason(s) to drop those off pfSense distributions? Both Plus and CE?

Thank you.

stephenw10 · Mar 18, 2024, 5:45 PM

It's not actually built on the FreeBSD 14 release. The modules we build for pfSense have always been a subset of the available modules. It doesn't make sense to build a lot of those for a firewall/router. New modules are added to our build list and ice_ddp wasn't on it at that time.

salexandrov · Mar 18, 2024, 6:56 PM

@stephenw10 This is not entirely correct.
OPNSense 24.1.X was based on FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE-p9 - way before FreeBSD 14 released.
Guess what? I does includes ICE DDP.

freebsd-version

13.2-RELEASE-p9

ls -la /boot/kernel |grep ice

-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 705024 Jan 25 06:16 ice_ddp.ko
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 15312 Jan 25 06:16 icee.ko
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 604728 Jan 25 06:16 if_ice.ko
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 17384 Jan 25 06:16 ng_device.ko

Please advise and thank you.

stephenw10 · Mar 18, 2024, 7:00 PM

The module was not on our build list when 2.7.2 was built. It is in fact available in 23.09.1.

salexandrov · Mar 18, 2024, 7:16 PM

@stephenw10 Means, (I'm sorry to say) you intentionally dropped ICE DDP from both PLUS (you said "included in 24.03" earlier) and CE released on 2023-12-07 (https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/releases/versions.html#pfsense-ce-software). Correct? I can not test PLUS because this is CE related forum, and I had a hope. Thank you.

stephenw10 · Mar 18, 2024, 7:58 PM

I had 24.03 open at the time to check but the module is also in 23.09.1.

We build a limited selection of kernel modules and update them as required. This one happened to not be on the list in 2.7.X.

There's already a feature request open for it: https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/15174

salexandrov · Mar 19, 2024, 3:51 PM

@stephenw10 I'm afraid that's not entirely accurate. After the pfSense 2.7.2 installation process, I observed that the if_ice and ice_ddp modules, which were present in the /boot/kernel directory of the 2.7.2 ISO image, are no longer available. This could potentially be a glitch or a bug in the installation procedure. Following the transfer of these modules from the ISO to the pfSense installation and the addition of corresponding "tunable variables" (if_ice_load and ice_ddp_load), along with a reboot, all functionalities are now operational. With DDP loaded, I now have 16 Tx and Rx queues instead of just one. Thank you.

stephenw10 · Mar 19, 2024, 4:20 PM

Hmm, well that's interesting! I would not have expected any difference in the modules built there. Well that's an easy solution at least.

salexandrov · Mar 19, 2024, 4:30 PM

@stephenw10 Well, 2.7.2 and 23.09.1 have the same kernel version, so the both versions should have the same set of compiled drivers. BTW, 2.6 CE also has ice_ddp on ISO, but not after installation ;)

jsone · Jun 5, 2025, 2:25 PM

out of curiosity now that 2.8 has been released,

can anyone confirm if 2.8.x CE contains the /boot/kernel/ice_ddp.ko drivers by default?

salexandrov · Jun 5, 2025, 3:06 PM

@jsone Downloading, let me check it out, hold on

stephenw10 · Jun 5, 2025, 3:59 PM

It does not.

stephenw10 · Jun 5, 2025, 4:01 PM

Or rather the ice driver is included but not ice_ddp.

jsone · Jun 5, 2025, 4:25 PM

thank you for the update despite the fact that the answer is a little disheartening

salexandrov · Jun 5, 2025, 5:22 PM

@jsone Nope. It has icee.ko only, however the "installer" image has ice_ddp.ko. Manually copied from installer ISO to /boot/kernel, reboot (of course), tunables "ice_ddp_load=YES" do not work, neither in /boot/loader.conf ... and soooo version mismatch. it doesn't not work ... sorry ... They use modified FreeBSD kernel, so it may not work if copy from FreeBSD mainstream ... didn't check, but here we go. Thank you.

salexandrov · Jun 5, 2025, 7:20 PM

@jsone switch to OPNSense ;)