LAN Speed not reflecting Correctly

smh410

@stephenw10 LAN NIC is connected to a 2.5G Switch, just a standard run of the mill tp-link switch.

Kinda just figured it out, so the Switch is only going to operate at 100/1gb/2.5gb that's why it won't update the speed in pfsense. ISP is at 2Gig.

I guess this raises another question, why won't the NIC allow the speed to be set at 2.5gbs, this specific card can do "multi gig". Maybe the firmware needs to be updated?

dev.ixl.2.fw_version: fw 9.840.76614 api 1.15 nvm 9.40 etid 8000e9b2 oem 22.5632.7
dev.ixl.2.current_speed: 1 Gbps
dev.ixl.2.supported_speeds: 6
dev.ixl.2.advertise_speed: 6

stephenw10

Run at the command line: ifconfig -vvm ixl2

What media speeds does it claim to support?

smh410

media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
status: active
supported media:
media autoselect
media 10Gbase-T
media 1000baseT

smh410

FWIW - i did a speed test from console as and getting the below so it's definately getting the faster speed at the WAN level.

Hosted by Clouvider Ltd (New York, NY) [30.16 km]: 5.337 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 1348.46 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 408.32 Mbit/s

if it ends up being the NIC's firmware, I might just upgrade to a 10gb Switch with multi gig support and repurpose the old one and that should work as well.

stephenw10

It could well be the firmware. But also could be the driver. What pfSense version is that?

Either way it cannot report anything other than the available speeds list. Even if it's actually linked at 2.5G. Though the device it's linked to should report the correct speed if it is.

smh410

2.7.2-RELEASE (amd64)
built on Mon Mar 4 19:53:00 UTC 2024
FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT

stephenw10

Mmm, the driver code appears to be in that if the NIC/firmware supports it:
https://github.com/pfsense/FreeBSD-src/commit/abf774528d7e497460510b0026db85e30f054142

smh410

Yup. Assuming no simple way to update the firmware, and beyond the scope of my expertise. Don’t want to risk bricking it. I’ll see if the new switch allows for the full bandwidth from my ISP and maybe revisit in the future.

smh410

@stephenw10

did some more digging. Looks like it's just dell crippling the card.

Is something like this possible within pfsense console?

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/crossflashing-intel-official-firmware-on-dell-lenovo-pcie-x710-da2-nics-solved/196357/11

stephenw10

Not from pfSense directly. There might be FreeBSD utils for it but I would just boot Linux to do it as shown there.

smh410

got it, so dual boot from the same box and make the changes in linux? assuming no remote way to do this.

stephenw10

Even if it were possible to do remotely I would want to be local to do it. You may need to power cycle the device.

But, yes, I would just boot a live Linux image from USB and try to run the firmware update from there.

smh410

Got it. Thanks so much for the help!