Intel X520 - ixgbe hangs

[Sachin]

Hi all,

I was looking at this card for FreeNAS 9.2...anyone tried this with the latest FreeNAS release?

TIA
-Sachin

 

[Koplin]

I upgraded to 9.2 as soon as I could and I then promptly had one of my domain controllers OS drives destroyed, the system stayed connected rather then reboot but after 24 hours of use I had to restore 1 machine, and fix a lot of others. I have since turned off 10 gig on my storage system pending a time when I can test this better. For now my only solution is to put dedicated 1 gig links to each node of my ESXi cluster. I am going to buy a different 10 gig card as well when time allows

It was more stable but I wouldn't call it production ready.

in 9.1 I could reliably get the system to lockup and fail doing a simple iometer saturation test. less then 2 hours in I would have disconnects then the box would lockup and restart.

in 9.2 I could only ever get 4.5Gbps~5Gbps and it would be best described as bursty, a wave of speed followed by a wave of slowdown. Then I had the corruption (as yet undetermined why)

I did no tuning this is all stock and auto-tune on.

That's what I have.

Chris

 

[Sachin]

Humn,

That sounds like work in progress.

Thanks Chris.

Sachin

 

[jamiejunk]

Does anyone know if the ixgbe driver is still a problem? We were looking at getting a few of the intel X540 nics.

 

[c32767a]

Does anyone know if the ixgbe driver is still a problem? We were looking at getting a few of the intel X540 nics.

https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/4560

As of 9.2.1.5, it was still a problem on our systems. It looks like the fix in that bug is targeted for FreeNAS 9.3.

We switched to SolarFlare before we upgraded to 9.2.1.6 and haven't had any trouble. I know IX ships Chelsio with their systems.

 

[morph027]

Working for us!

 

[c32767a]

Working for us!

Is that the stock driver in 9.2.1.6, or the one you said you were going to build?

 

[jamiejunk]

I shot most of our wad buying the 10gig Juniper 4500. I budgeted about $500 for Nics thinking we'd be doing the Intel nics. Looks like the Chelsio and SolarFlare are close to 1K each. Crap.

 

[cyberjock]

Honestly, I got my Intel x520 NICs for like $100 each on ebay. They work very well if you aren't expecting to saturate 10Gb.

On the flipside, I've seen iperf tests between chelsio cards do 9.5Gb/sec and I've yet to see Intel hit 9Gb/sec. So there is definitely some difference, but when comparing the cost between the two I consider the Intel a clear winner. But, if this is going to be put in production use, etc etc etc definitely consider the Chelsios. If your scenario seems acceptable for Intel then feel free to go with Intel. I'm very happy with mine and as I could never afford 10Gb for my home setup with Chelsio I'm *extremely* satisfied with what I've gotten from Intel.

I easily hit 600MB/sec on my server with bursts to 800MB/sec. So don't be fearful of the X520s. If you need a card that can do a solid 500MB/sec Intel definitely will work.

 

[morph027]

Is that the stock driver in 9.2.1.6, or the one you said you were going to build?

The stock one from 9.2.1.6 .... We also tried to max out cards with some basic iperf and wget (from memory to /dev/null) over night, as the old driver worked fine too for a while and crashed after some time (zero rx/tx while still pretending to be up like always) and we ran 10gbs for 5 nights/days stable ;)

 

[jamiejunk]

Thanks for the advice guys. I'll take the plunge and see what happens.