Broadcom 57810 Woes

[Grunt]

I've had a FreeNAS box setup for a few months now running rock solid with a quad port Intel NIC. Recently purchased a Dell Broadcom 57810 dual SFP+ NIC off ebay and slapped it into the box. On initial startup, the NIC comes online and works great but after a few minutes, the console dumps a ton of errors and the connection goes dead, although ifconfig still shows them as up.

The compatibility list shows the chipset as being supported.
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.1R/hardware.html#ethernet

I read in an old thread from 2013 that disabling a few functions helped stabilize the cards. How would I go about disabling the features mentioned in the thread? They set it in /etc/rc.conf but that's with FreeNAS 9, would I still do the same with FreeNAS 11?
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2013-July/036123.html

What else can I do to troubleshoot the issue before determining I have a faulty card?

 

[Grunt]

Got the NIC stable, though some odd stuff is going on outside of FreeNAS. Moving the NIC to an alternate PCI-e slot resolved the issue and the box has 16GB of RAM installed but when the NIC is installed, only 8GB appears in BIOS. I'll need to read up on the motherboard manual, see what gives.

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

Moving the NIC to an alternate PCI-e slot resolved the issue and the box has 16GB of RAM installed but when the NIC is installed, only 8GB appears in BIOS.

It isn't uncommon for 10G NIC's to request a lot of RAM for buffers. Improving performance is a never ending thing. If your 1G NIC was the bottleneck in the past, now it has moved to something else like not enough RAM, slow drive controllers, slow drives, etc. The story goes on and on... :)

 

[alfoele69]

Got the NIC stable, though some odd stuff is going on outside of FreeNAS. Moving the NIC to an alternate PCI-e slot resolved the issue and the box has 16GB of RAM installed but when the NIC is installed, only 8GB appears in BIOS. I'll need to read up on the motherboard manual, see what gives.

Hi, I have the same problem and it's not a card requirement. I have 32+32GB and if i boot with the card inserted, one ram slot is not seen from BIOS. Did you solved the problem? Can you please tell me the motherboard model and the CPU installed? Did you tried to update bios?
Thank you

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, the Broadcom cards aren't known for working well.

There's a complete discussion of well-supported 10G cards over in the 10 Gig Networking Primer, available elsewhere on these forums.

 

[alfoele69]

Yeah, the Broadcom cards aren't known for working well.

There's a complete discussion of well-supported 10G cards over in the 10 Gig Networking Primer, available elsewhere on these forums.

Yes, but I need that card because I need to connect to a GPON provider and I have to set the NIC speed at 2.5Gbps HSGMII. So I would like to know if
Grunt had found a solution (e.g bios update) and the motherbord, cpu, etc... to compare with mine. The producer of mine said me that the problem is RAM, then CPU, then socket, but I'm sure that is a kind of incompatibility between the motherboard/PCIe and the card, and I hope in a bios update not available at the moment (I will try to update, if available, a new NIC firmware).
Thank you

 

[jgreco]

Well, Grunt hasn't been seen since the day two years ago when that was posted.

Am I to interpret what you're saying correctly as: you are trying to connect your NAS directly to an ISP connection? Because that is strongly disrecommended. See if you can get a firewall host in there somewhere, and then put real 10G cards in both that and the NAS.