Broadcom NICs and upgrading to pfSense 2.5.1
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We're running pfSense on a Dell PowerEdge R210 II, with a Xeon E3-1230, two built-in Broadcom/QLogic BCM5716C gigabit ports, and two Intel PRO/1000 quad cards, on which a total of five ports were used. We had no problems running or upgrading any version of pfSense from 2.4.4. However, during the upgrade to 2.5.1, pfSense hung during the initial boot at configuring the WAN interface, which was defined on one of the Broadcom/QLogic ports. We ended up having to move the two connections from the Broadcom ports to the Intel cards and do a clean installation and restore a backup.
Has anyone else had problems with Broadcom NICs? Could it be something else?
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@eveningstarnm said in Broadcom NICs and upgrading to pfSense 2.5.1:
BCM5716C
The hardware notes on FreeBSD 12.2 do include the BCM5716 but not the 'C' version if it matters.
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.2R/hardware/#support
Did you try a fresh install and restoring your backup?
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@EveningStarNM said:
We ended up having to move the two connections from the Broadcom ports to the Intel cards and do a clean installation and restore a backup.
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@eveningstarnm
I saw. I thought for some reason you wanted to use the BC. -
@eveningstarnm said in Broadcom NICs and upgrading to pfSense 2.5.1:
We're running pfSense on a Dell PowerEdge R210 II, with a Xeon E3-1230, two built-in Broadcom/QLogic BCM5716C gigabit ports, and two Intel PRO/1000 quad cards, on which a total of five ports were used. We had no problems running or upgrading any version of pfSense from 2.4.4. However, during the upgrade to 2.5.1, pfSense hung during the initial boot at configuring the WAN interface, which was defined on one of the Broadcom/QLogic ports. We ended up having to move the two connections from the Broadcom ports to the Intel cards and do a clean installation and restore a backup.
Has anyone else had problems with Broadcom NICs? Could it be something else?
pfSense-2.5.0 and higher (now 2.5.1) are based on FreeBSD 12.2-STABLE. pfSense-2.4.4 was based on FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE. There was a very big change in the way NIC drivers work with the major version step from 11 to 12 in FreeBSD. Eveything moved over to a new wapper library system called
iflib. This introduced some unintended "bugs" in a few NIC drivers that had worked perfectly fine in FreeBSD 11.x. I don't know if your specific NIC was one of them, but if it worked fine on pfSense-2.4.4, and quit working with the upgrade that moved to FreeBSD 12.x, then the move toiflibwould be my first suspicion. -
@bmeeks Thank you. It seems like with every new major release of an OS, it's always the drivers that are the biggest problem. After 40 years, I've learned that I can count on at least a quarter (and way too often many more) of the fleet being down while we either revert back to the old OS version or find working drivers for the new one.
I suppose that we all know that this will never change. But we still get to complain about it, dammit.
Fortunately, I also learned that you can't have too many spare NICs of different types from a variety of manufacturers. (That cabinet has a lock on it, and don't even dream that I won't find out if someone breaks into it.)
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After my upgrade to 2.5.1 I also was faceing some "strange" issues with my broadcom nics, too (I can remember, i several problems some years ago...)
However:
Given a special situation my broadcom nics started to change states from up to down and vice-versa. Was well documented in my logs.
I started searching and stumbled about several threads and blogposts pointing me to the drivers for broadcom nics.https://www.it-react.com/index.php/2021/03/08/pfsense-re0-watchdog-timeout-error/
The blog-post gives a brief introduktion to the problem and solution. I went with the now already availeable package through pkg.
Solved my problem and as it seems the day to day performance seems to be better as well. Might be worth to take a look into.
