I recently got a brand new Dell PowerEdge R610 server, I installed VMWare ESXi 5.0 on it and attempted to install FreeBSD as guest OS for squid caching.
The server has a PCI-E Intel X520-T2 10Gig Network Card Coper Dual Port, which is intended to be used for high speed data transfer between gateway and cache servers, but I'm now having trouble make it work under FreeBSD.
I initially install two FreeBSD boxes and added the 10gig card as e1000 to both of them, it worked but apparently with only around 1gig/s performance, which is really poor. Then I tried adding the NIC as VMxNet2 and VMxNet3, they didn't work 'cause the VMWare-Tool for FreeBSD is broken on FreeBSD 9, and the open-vm-tools compiled, installed, and didn't even detect the interface for unknown reason.
So finally I found that passthrough might be a great idea and I configured VMWare ESXi to passthrough both of the 10gig interfaces, and added them as PCI devices to my FreeBSD boxes. I thought this way the FreeBSD should detects the hardware and assign suitable driver for the NIC, but it didn't.
The problem I'm getting is I tried to re-compile kernel with ixgbe device enabled, the system detects the device correctly, assigned the driver version 2.3.3, and I was able to see ix0 interface from ifconfig. But I can't ping, can't connect to anything since the status of the device is "no carrier". I googled the error message and turns out that is a driver problem, so I downloaded the newest version of ixgbe from Intel official website, compiled and installed the driver, now the system can detect and assign driver 2.4.4 for the interface, but I'm still getting no carrier erro message.
I don't have access to the server right now, so I can't provide any output, I'll update my question once I can obtain logs.
BTW, the I believe the FreeBSD I have is the newest one, FreeBSD9-Stable, with src updated on 16 Feb 2012.
PS. I tried installing FreeBSD 9 Release version with GENERAL kernel, same problem.
Could anyone please provide me any link, thought, or troubleshoot method, thank you very much.
Regards,
Hai Lang
The server has a PCI-E Intel X520-T2 10Gig Network Card Coper Dual Port, which is intended to be used for high speed data transfer between gateway and cache servers, but I'm now having trouble make it work under FreeBSD.
I initially install two FreeBSD boxes and added the 10gig card as e1000 to both of them, it worked but apparently with only around 1gig/s performance, which is really poor. Then I tried adding the NIC as VMxNet2 and VMxNet3, they didn't work 'cause the VMWare-Tool for FreeBSD is broken on FreeBSD 9, and the open-vm-tools compiled, installed, and didn't even detect the interface for unknown reason.
So finally I found that passthrough might be a great idea and I configured VMWare ESXi to passthrough both of the 10gig interfaces, and added them as PCI devices to my FreeBSD boxes. I thought this way the FreeBSD should detects the hardware and assign suitable driver for the NIC, but it didn't.
The problem I'm getting is I tried to re-compile kernel with ixgbe device enabled, the system detects the device correctly, assigned the driver version 2.3.3, and I was able to see ix0 interface from ifconfig. But I can't ping, can't connect to anything since the status of the device is "no carrier". I googled the error message and turns out that is a driver problem, so I downloaded the newest version of ixgbe from Intel official website, compiled and installed the driver, now the system can detect and assign driver 2.4.4 for the interface, but I'm still getting no carrier erro message.
I don't have access to the server right now, so I can't provide any output, I'll update my question once I can obtain logs.
BTW, the I believe the FreeBSD I have is the newest one, FreeBSD9-Stable, with src updated on 16 Feb 2012.
PS. I tried installing FreeBSD 9 Release version with GENERAL kernel, same problem.
Could anyone please provide me any link, thought, or troubleshoot method, thank you very much.
Regards,
Hai Lang