I don’t want to piss on everyone’s parade, and I realize it’s an old-ish post, but a word of advice: the Dell flavor only officially supports 10GbE. Having said that, it also unofficially supports 5GbE, but nothing below that—so no support for 2.5GbE. I have both the Aquantia and Dell branded SFPs, and while the Dell will establish a link at the PHY level at all speeds, including 2.5GbE, not a single packet gets thru at anything <5GbE. Conversely, the Aquantia flavor is as happy as can be at all speeds.
They’re identical, except the Dell version I have shows revision AQR107*A* on the chip (I have 2 Dell SFPs, same for both):
Since I can see a link at the PHY level on the Dell at 1GbE and 2.5GbE, it’s either a crippled version of the 107 purposely sold to Dell so it doesn’t cannibalize its own switching business, or it might just be a revision of the chip, and the connectivity is crippled at the firmware level. Hoping it was the latter, I’ve tried to identify the chips on the board in hope one of them was an EEPROM I could mess with. See pic for back side (the purple/white gunk is from the stock thermal pad).
The hope was to dump the data from the Aquantia flavor, and flash the Dell flavor with it. Easier said than done. The “2165” chip is an ADP2165, it’s a DC-DC regulator, not what we’re looking for. Out of the other 3, the most likely candidate is the one on the top right, labeled “4H120”. Here’s a close-up:
The other 2 are unlikely to be EEPROMs, their markings aren’t helpful so I’m not 100% sure what they actually do.
I’ve tried, but I just can’t identify the “4H120” chip. I plan to desolder it and mess with it with flashrom, however I’m a little worried I might destroy a perfectly good SFP module, the chip is so tiny I know I will have a hard time when it’s time to put it back (it looks like a TSSOP-8 to me).
Other than that, both Dell and Aquantia flavors may be old, but they still work vastly better than any other SFPs when it comes to anything < 10GbE. Aquantia was really ahead of its time, Marvell killed all the good stuff when they acquired them and discontinued the product line while pushing their Marvell Alaska chip instead, which is in 99% of the SFPs sold these days. Alaska is utter rubbish at 2.5 and 5GbE, it just can’t handle the traffic well, and it requires the host to handle the intermediate speeds natively as well. Conversely, Aquantia is able to fool your 10GbE-only switch into thinking the link is at 10GbE—the AQR107 constantly introduces PAUSE frames to “tame” its host, and while some purists will consider it a bit crude, in real life, it works really well.