Hi Craig,Well, it's finally ready for release.
I finished the main code merge about two weeks ago. Since then I've been testing and tweaking to ensure the driver loads and operates properly.
I have named the driver ixgbe_x553_7 to indicate that it's the ixgbe driver but specifically for Intel X553/7 devices. In the attached vib, I've mapped the driver to load only for the device IDs listed below.
Code:8086:15c2, 8086:15c3, 8086:15c4 8086:15c6, 8086:15c7, 8086:15c8 8086:15ca, 8086:15cc, 8086:15ce 8086:15e4, 8086:15e5
I have tested the driver with ESXi 6.7 on my Supermicro A2SDi-16C-HLN4F motherboard which has 4 x X553 NICs (device ID 8086:15e4). I successfully tested the following configurations:
[ ... ]
- ESXi 6.7
- As a VMkernel NIC
- VM CentOS 7.4 x64
- Standard NIC connected to a virtual switch
- PCI passthrough device
- VM Win 7 x64
- Standard NIC connected to a virtual switch
- PCI passthrough device (device was seen by OS but no Windows driver available)
- VM Win 10 x64
- Standard NIC connected to a virtual switch
- PCI passthrough device (device was seen by OS but no Windows driver available)
Hi JJ,... the CPU usage hovers betwen 20% and 55%, which is really high.
... So, something in the networking area of this combo, x553 NICs with the driver attached to this thread and ESXi 6.7 is not functioning correctly.
set pcplusmp:apic_timer_preferred_mode = 0x0
Hi JJ,
I'm sorry to hear you're experiencing problems. I'm still using build 6 of my driver (attached to post #37 of this thread). I am not (and have not) experienced any CPU load problems. In fact, I've not experienced problems of any kind with this driver.
My setup:
The load average on each individual VM is, most of the time, negligible (same as you). When I monitor the ESXi host itself (via the HTML5 embedded host client) the CPU usage is 0.31% (min 0.3%, max 7.7%, avg 0.59%).
- Supermicro A2SDi-16C-HLN4F
- Driver net-ixgbe_x553_7-4.5.3-6.x86_64
- ESXi 6.7 customized to ESXi-6.7.0-20180604001-standard (release date 25 June 2018)
- 6 VMs (2 x Solaris 11, 2 x CentOS 7 x64, 1 x CentOS 7 x32, 1 x Ubuntu 16.04 x64)
Even when my VMs are working hard (1 is a web/db server, 2 are compilers, 1 does video encoding) my load average never gets above 25% (but remember, I'm working with 16 cores).
Can I ask, what makes you suspect the load is caused by the network and/or the driver?
The only time I've experienced ESXi load that did not appear to be attributable to a guest VM was with Solaris 11 (11/11). The cause was an interrupt storm due to an incompatibility between ESXi and the Solaris interrupt timing mode. It was a problem unique to that specific version of Solaris and did not show up as load in the Solaris VM (i.e. ESXi load 100%, Solaris VM load 0%). Adding the following line to /etc/system on the Solaris VM solved the problem.
I mention this only to show that finding the cause of ESXi load can sometimes be tricky. I suspect you'll have to do much more investigation to get to the root cause.Code:set pcplusmp:apic_timer_preferred_mode = 0x0
As a starting point, what does the output of esxtop show?
Before you go and reinstall everything, I should tell you that I don't believe build 6 of the driver will make any difference to your problem.Darn it, now I realized what happened: I did use your driver from post #32, not post #37.
Back to the drawing board. I'll do the reinstalls and provide updates.
Hi JJ,Given the fact that the overall CPU usage is down... I declare the operation a stunning success.
You're welcome.And all I can say is a big THANK YOU for creating this driver.
May I wonder for what need you are willing to build 2 node Ha cluster?Hello guys
I want to create a laboratory environment using No. 2 A2SDi-16C-HLN4F and VMware 6.5 (cluster). I wanted to know if any of you have found compatibility problems with this combination.
I have read that the x553 network cards are not recognized.
another thing the cluster should handle around 20 vm. the cpu is able to handle these loads?
Thank you