Support for Chelsio T520-BT

[Lars Jensen]

Hi all

Is Chelsio T520-BT supported in FreeNAS 9.3 or is it too new ?

I get the error on the attached image when booting FreeNAS. If I pull out the card FreeNAS boots fine. The card is installed in a PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot.

 

[Ericloewe]

What motherboard are we talking about? Desktop boards are often picky about non-graphics cards in their PCI-e 16x slots.

 

[Lars Jensen]

Board is Supermicro X9DR7-LN4F, I also tried a x8 slot but same error.

 

[Ericloewe]

There goes the easy possibility. Maybe someone knows something about the T520.

 

[cyberjock]

I'm 99.999% sure that the T520-BT is supported. I know iXsystem sells FreeNAS and TrueNAS machines with the T520. I just don't know if the -BT at the end means anything special, or if those differences mean anything in terms of compatibility.

If you know that the BT doesn't mean anything too scary, I'd say that something is wrong and it should be working just fine.

 

[Lars Jensen]

BT is a T520 edition with RJ-45 connector using CAT6a at least to have 10G speed.

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah, TrueNAS only sells with the T520 that uses SFP+. So it might work, but it might not. There's no way to know as my sources don't appear to have tested it.

 

[Lars Jensen]

I thought T520 behaved the same with different connectors. SFP+ seems the way to go then, RJ-45 was just easy to integrate with existing network. I see there's some updates available to FreeNAS on the box, will try to update, but don't expect any change. Crossing fingers though

 

[cyberjock]

Actually, one of the 2 most recent releases changed the driver for the T520 cards. So I'd definitely recommend upgrading to the latest build.

 

[Lars Jensen]

I have now tried updating to FreeNAS-9.3-Nightlies-201506070630, but it still gets the error at the point in boot where it's trying to DHCP an IP to the NIC.

I doubt it would make a difference but is it possible for a NIC to be excluded from DHCP during boot ?

 

[BigDave]

From the man pages

 

[BigDave]

I read the T5 cards are PCIe 3.0 so that could be your issue???

 

[Lars Jensen]

The link to man page, was that a hint that I need to edit loader.conf to load the cxgbe driver ? (or reinstall FreeNAS so it discovers the T520-BT and configures itself to load the driver ? ... I've post-installed NIC after FreeNAS install... would that be a problem ?)

https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon/c600/x9dr7-ln4f.cfm states that all slots are PCIe 3.0, so I guess this should not be the issue unless something should be configured in BIOS to force 3.0.

Is the FreeNAS 10 Nightlies worth a try ? (isn't the cxgbe driver backported to 9.3 ?)

 

[BigDave]

The link to man page, was that a hint that I need to edit loader.conf to load the cxgbe driver ?

Oh God no! I was just trying to help out in a very meager way about T5 support question...

states that all slots are PCIe 3.0, so I guess this should not be the issue unless something should be configured in BIOS to force 3.0.

Your board AND the cpu support is needed for 3.0 use. I'm just asking the questions...

 

[Lars Jensen]

Maybe the NIC is broken or somehow incompatible with the motherboard, since I tried "Identify Ports" in the Chelsio Unified BOOT Setup Utility (v1.0.0.68), and it kind of froze when trying to identify ports (led was blinking and it froze, and eventually rebooted after a short time).

The driver in 9.3 seems to have support for T520-BT in 9.3:

if_cxgbe.ko (/boot/kernel/if_cxgbe.ko)
Contains modules:
Id Name
476 pci/t5nex
475 t4nex/cxgbe
474 t5nex/cxl
477 pci/t4nex

 

[Ericloewe]

Definitely sounds like a hardware issue of some sort, then.

Outright incompatibility is unlikely, so I'm thinking that the card is probably defective.

 

[Lars Jensen]

My thought too, also noticed a tiny red light marked "D1003" on the NIC itself, however it turns off after a while (don't know what the red light on a Chelsio NIC mean = http://www.chelsio.com/hardware-installation/ answer 3). I wrote a mail to Chelsio support to see if they have a solution.

 

[rogerh]

I know it is obvious, but you could prevent it interacting with DHCP by giving it a fixed IP. Might at least refine the identification of what fails.

 

[Lars Jensen]

My thought too, also noticed a tiny red light marked "D1003" on the NIC itself is on, however it turns off after a while (don't know what the red light on a Chelsio NIC mean). I wrote a mail to Chelsio support to see if they have a solution.

I know it is obvious, but you could prevent it interacting with DHCP by giving it a fixed IP. Might at least refine the identification of what fails.

Will try setting a static IP in FreeNAS (I guess this stops DHCP'ing on other NICS including T520-BT during boot ?)

 

[rogerh]

Will try setting a static IP in FreeNAS (I guess this stops DHCP'ing on other NICS including T520-BT during boot ?)

Do you have more than one NIC in your FreeNAS server? Unless they are deliberately bridged, each needs setting up separately. The first NIC available on installation is, I think, automatically set to DHCP unless you choose a static IP. Additional NICs are not enabled at all, I think, though this is an n=1 observation. Unless you set up DHCP on the T520 in the GUI (or CLI for that matter) it will not be enabled at all. Though that shouldn't cause a crash, setting it up as fixed *or* explicitly DHCP would at least provide different conditions for the driver. I'd try both if you haven't already. Doing so shouldn't affect your other NIC(s).