Intel Ethernet Controller I225-LM Support?

stephenw10 · Aug 16, 2021, 2:11 PM

Most of the issues on this thread seem to be from UDP checksum which you can easily disable or run a 2.6 snapshot. We've seen no issues running the i225-V in the 6100.

Steve

whizatit · Aug 16, 2021, 2:11 PM

@stephenw10
on the 6100? sorry confused.

stephenw10 · Aug 16, 2021, 2:25 PM

4 of the i225-V NICs are used in the Netgate 6100. They work fine there.

Steve

bk150 · Aug 16, 2021, 3:11 PM

After disabling UDP checksum offloading, my I225-LMs are working great. I'm able to pull ~940 mbit/sec down and ~1100 mbit/sec upload hooked into an AT&T BGW-320. I'm provisioned for gigabit service so the cards seem to be working as expected.

jerseymike · Aug 16, 2021, 4:52 PM

@bk150 Same here. The outstanding question being, when will the driver get fixed so that HW offloading can be enabled again?

bk150 · Aug 16, 2021, 4:54 PM

@jerseymike it's already fixed in the 2.6.0 development builds :)

I would think the particular fixed could be implemented in the next 2.5.3 release but either way it should be working in 2.6.

jerseymike · Aug 16, 2021, 5:12 PM

@bk150 So I guess my next question is...

is 2.6.0 stable enough to use right now? LOL

bk150 · Aug 16, 2021, 5:14 PM

@jerseymike I guess it depends on your use case. I definitely wouldn't use it in production at a business but for home use, depends on how understanding your family members are

I don't see any issue with using 2.5.2 with the UDP checksum hardware offloading disabled as my understanding is that it's still doing the UDP checksum, it's just in software instead of running on the network controller hardware itself. I would think this is sufficient for most cases as high loads of UDP traffic is pretty rare.

whizatit · Aug 16, 2021, 9:00 PM

Ok so thats f***** up it works in their own appliance but not public release? Stingy holding out on us lol. Not being mean just saying...

stephenw10 · Aug 16, 2021, 9:36 PM

It was just unfortunate timing. We had a bunch of cool fixes for things in the 2.5.2 branch, including this. We had to eventually build 2.5.2 on the 2.5.0 branch because it was going to take too long to get everything fixed and tested when there were security patches ready to go.

I have 2.6 running on a bunch of things without issue but there are still some outstanding things, most notably captive portal. https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/12217
That may be fixed in tomorrows snap though.

But check the list and decide for yourself:
https://redmine.pfsense.org/projects/pfsense/issues?query_id=106

Steve

whizatit · Aug 16, 2021, 10:23 PM

I am soooo damn slow... I just now realized your an admin and work with Netgate lol. Thanks for the heads up sir!

I'm just like everyone else, WE want "the" answer or answers and don't pay attention to everything else/details.

Goes to show READ EVERYTHING BEFORE doing ANYTHING!

arodd · Sep 10, 2021, 5:34 PM

I'm running the latest 2.6.0 snapshot with the QNAP QXG-2G2T-I225 and it is detected in the initial boot, but doesn't detect any interfaces and then shuts down. There are no other nics enabled(onboard is disabled in the BIOS). Maybe this specific device id isn't enabled, though I would have expected it to be a popular option. Has anyone else successfully gotten this specific card working? It is significantly cheaper than the 10Gb Intel varieties that support 2.5Gb 10GbaseT.

silvercharge · Sep 11, 2021, 1:50 AM

@arodd I've had inconsistent results as well using two of the single interface versions of the QNAP i225s - QXG-2G1T-I225. Also running 2.60. Sometimes the driver loads and others it does not. Currently running 2.6.0.a.20210907.0100 with success.

stephenw10 · Sep 11, 2021, 12:40 PM

You have any logs showing it detected but not attaching maybe?

arodd · Sep 11, 2021, 11:56 PM

@stephenw10 I think I would need to fetch them via serial interface or something. It shuts down as soon as it boots up since there are no interfaces detected so there isn't an opportunity to fetch them and log to a flash drive or anything. Will see if I can get a serial port to dump the boot log.

Edit: Scratch that my unit doesn't have a serial port. Will try and find another way to capture them if the boot/system log persists on disk after multiple boots.

arodd · Sep 12, 2021, 12:49 AM

@stephenw10 dmesg.txt
Was able to fetch everything via single user mode, attached the dmesg output. The igc0 specific lines are below. This is from the latest 2.6.0.a.20210910.0100. Looks to be the same issue as previous posters, but still occurring in 2.6.x.

igc0: <Intel(R) Ethernet Controller I225-LM> mem 0xf7c00000-0xf7cfffff,0xf7d00000-0xf7d03fff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci3
igc0: Setup of Shared code failed, error -2
igc0: IFDI_ATTACH_PRE failed 6
device_attach: igc0 attach returned 6
igc0: <Intel(R) Ethernet Controller I225-LM> mem 0xf7900000-0xf79fffff,0xf7a00000-0xf7a03fff irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci6
igc0: Setup of Shared code failed, error -2
igc0: IFDI_ATTACH_PRE failed 6
device_attach: igc0 attach returned 6
igc0: <Intel(R) Ethernet Controller I225-LM> mem 0xf7c00000-0xf7cfffff,0xf7d00000-0xf7d03fff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci3
igc0: Setup of Shared code failed, error -2
igc0: IFDI_ATTACH_PRE failed 6
device_attach: igc0 attach returned 6
igc0: <Intel(R) Ethernet Controller I225-LM> mem 0xf7900000-0xf79fffff,0xf7a00000-0xf7a03fff irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci6
igc0: Setup of Shared code failed, error -2
igc0: IFDI_ATTACH_PRE failed 6
device_attach: igc0 attach returned 6
igc0: <Intel(R) Ethernet Controller I225-LM> mem 0xf7c00000-0xf7cfffff,0xf7d00000-0xf7d03fff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci3
igc0: Setup of Shared code failed, error -2
igc0: IFDI_ATTACH_PRE failed 6
device_attach: igc0 attach returned 6
igc0: <Intel(R) Ethernet Controller I225-LM> mem 0xf7900000-0xf79fffff,0xf7a00000-0xf7a03fff irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci6
igc0: Setup of Shared code failed, error -2
igc0: IFDI_ATTACH_PRE failed 6
device_attach: igc0 attach returned 6

arodd · Sep 12, 2021, 2:34 AM

So it turns out my issue was related to booting via BIOS vs. UEFI. Realized this when it attached and was working in the installer CD via UEFI. Switched the install over to UEFI and everything is working now.

Update: Things work fine without VLANs, but traffic isn't flowing when using VLAN interfaces.

stephenw10 · Nov 1, 2021, 3:45 PM

Try disabling any vlan hardware off-loading options. I'd start with VLAN_HWFILTER if it's enabled on that variant.

The driver 2.6. is now identical to what we build in 21.05.1 (or 21.09) so oy must be some hardware difference.

Steve

ndemmon · Nov 1, 2021, 3:45 PM

@stephenw10

FYI, the Dell Optiplex I'm trying to use has the same driver attach problem reported above, if the internal NIC is linked up at boot time then the igc driver won't attach to my QNAP card.

The difference is that I'm an actual *nix kernel developer who knows how crazy that sounds...there must be some timing issue involved. I'd be willing to dive in on my free time and do some debugging or info gathering, but I'm currently hampered by the fact that I haven't touched FreeBSD ever so I'm doing things like searching for links on "this is how you build the kernel" :)

stephenw10 · Nov 1, 2021, 5:04 PM

I would start by booting with verbose enabled and see if the driver gives any sort of useful error output when it fails to attach.
Also that can change the timing so you may find it does attach when booting verbose, if it is a timing issue. I have seen that before with other hardware.

At the loader prompt:

set boot_verbose=1
boot

Steve