SOLVED Solareflare SFN6122F not being seen by TrueNAS

[Bane]

I bought a Soalrflare SFN6122F for my TrueNAS. The card shows up at hardware boot up of my system (Supermicro x9scm-f) but, it doesn't show under interfaces in TrueNAS. Is there something extra I need to do?

Thanks,

 

[Samuel Tai]

Unfortunately, TrueNAS doesn't have any drivers for this 10G NIC, sorry.

 

[Redcoat]

Unfortunately, TrueNAS doesn't have any drivers for this 10G NIC, sorry.

I have two of these, one in each of my X9SCM-F TrueNAS boxes, that were recognized immediately (sfxge0,1) and perform as expected according to iperf.

 

[blanchet]

I cannot tell for TrueNAS Core, but these SolarFlare NICs should work with Linux, so try TrueNAS Scale instead.

 

[Bane]

I have two of these, one in each of my X9SCM-F TrueNAS boxes, that were recognized immediately (sfxge0,1) and perform as expected according to iperf.

Do they just show up in the interfaces section of UI?

 

[jgreco]

I cannot tell for TrueNAS Core, but these SolarFlare NICs should work with Linux, so try TrueNAS Scale instead.

They should work with FreeBSD just fine too. These are available cheaply on the used market because the high performance crowd liked them very much, but they're not supported in ESXi 7, so lots of them are hitting the market.

 

[Bane]

I have two of these, one in each of my X9SCM-F TrueNAS boxes, that were recognized immediately (sfxge0,1) and perform as expected according to iperf.

What version of TrueNAS are you running?

 

[Bane]

They should work with FreeBSD just fine too. These are available cheaply on the used market because the high performance crowd liked them very much, but they're not supported in ESXi 7, so lots of them are hitting the market.

I'm on TrueNAS core. What does it take to move to TrueNAS Scale?

 

[Redcoat]

What version of TrueNAS are you running?

TrueNAS Core 12.0-U7

 

[Redcoat]

Do they just show up in the interfaces section of UI?

Yes

 

[Redcoat]

Do you have the latest BIOS version on your board - 2.3a from 01/06/2021? No idea if BIOS version could be the culprit ....

 

[Spearfoot]

These cards work well w/ TrueNAS/FreeNAS in my experience.

You may want to flash your card with the latest firmware, available here:

https://support-nic.xilinx.com/wp/drivers

I use the "Bootable ISO" to flash mine.

 

[Bane]

I got it working. The latest Supermicro BIOS update seems to have taken care of it. It now shows up as SFXGE0 and SFXGE1 in the UI.

 

[Redcoat]

Glad it worked out!!

 

[jgreco]

Well that's weird. They're known to work on the X9SCM.

 

[Bane]

Well that's weird. They're known to work on the X9SCM.

It seems that the issue with these solarflare cards is heat. If they do not have enough airflow, they will be too warm even at boot and not be recognized. I have had to put cooling fans on mine to make them stable.

 

[jgreco]

Yes, basically all the datacenter cards that like to put out 5-15 watts on their own need proper cooling. I think I made a note of that in the HBA post, maybe time to do so in the 10 Gig Networking Primer too... hm.

 

[Redcoat]

It seems that the issue with these solarflare cards is heat. If they do not have enough airflow, they will be too warm even at boot and not be recognized. I have had to put cooling fans on mine to make them stable.

Well, I had an interesting experience a few days ago. As my two boxes rebooted after updating to 12.0-U8, one of the two didn't see the Solarflare card on the first couple of reboots, so I shut it off and left it "for a bit" and it picked up the card on the second reboot attempt thereafter. I had not seen this behavior before.
I'm going to open the boxes and get any dust out, and I think I'll get a couple of fans, too.

 

[Bane]

Any of you using solarflare cards for LACP? I'm trying to setup LACP and I get the message at the command line that "all interfaces are assigned to VLAN's or LACP already." This is even if I remove the settings from all interfaces.

 

[jgreco]

That sounds more like a middleware warning.