6 port Intel i350 PCIe Card $46.99 and less for qty
- Thread starter MiniKnight
- Start date
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Possibly not, but if you don't pass through the raw devices, you pfsense ends up with "VMware VMXNET3 Ethernet Controller" - which probably does not support as many hardware options in the driver - but for most people's usage it probably does not make a lick of difference, but if you need some of the offloading capabilities of the network card, then the passthrough is needed.
@kousuke - just as a heads-up, Silicom makes adapters for many of the big OEMs/ embedded markets. They are not a household name, but Silicom makes some quad-port 1GbE adapters for Dell as well.
Maybe to have it operate as a switch as well? Honestly, I never needed more than two. There was a time when I only used one 10G port. But I run a managed switch with VLAN support.
I struggled days to configure pfsense as a switch, perhaps I don't know how to do it, as I kept on loosing management connection and there was no good documentation for it. It seems like pfsense will never make a good switch as it is quite heavy: Battle of the Virtual Routers – blog.kroy.io. Especially for gigabit links there is no point, I guess...
I did make it work on a J3355-ITX board as an experiment. Was able to reach ~1.2Gbps on a 10Gb link with 99.9% CPU utilization
So yeah, without ASIC you'd need some beefy processor to handle basic routing. Not worth it at all imho.Thanks Patrick - couldn't agree more - I invested on two nic. the nearly limitless SR-IOV assignments makes these nics a gem for homelabs!
I'm getting these high density nics for its SR-IOV capability - you can have up to 6 physical interfaces for each VM. Great for testing network appliances.
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Ok, after using it for a few years, did anyone tried to update the firmware on these cards?
My shows as:
Advertised Auto Negotiation: true
Advertised Link Modes: Auto, 1000BaseT/Full, 100BaseT/Full, 100BaseT/Half, 10BaseT/Full, 10BaseT/Half
Auto Negotiation: true
Backing DPUId: N/A
Cable Type: Twisted Pair
Current Message Level: 0
Driver Info:
Bus Info: 0000:03:00:1
Driver: igbn
Firmware Version: 1.52.0:0x00000000
Version: 1.4.11.7
Link Detected: true
Link Status: Up
Name: vmnic3
PHYAddress: 0
Pause Autonegotiate: false
Pause RX: true
Pause TX: true
Supported Ports: TP
Supports Auto Negotiation: true
Supports Pause: true
Supports Wakeon: false
Transceiver: internal
Virtual Address: 00:50:56:59:e2:b0
Wakeon: None
And Intel has update for i350 AM2 and AM4. Who dares to try?
www.intel.com
My shows as:
Advertised Auto Negotiation: true
Advertised Link Modes: Auto, 1000BaseT/Full, 100BaseT/Full, 100BaseT/Half, 10BaseT/Full, 10BaseT/Half
Auto Negotiation: true
Backing DPUId: N/A
Cable Type: Twisted Pair
Current Message Level: 0
Driver Info:
Bus Info: 0000:03:00:1
Driver: igbn
Firmware Version: 1.52.0:0x00000000
Version: 1.4.11.7
Link Detected: true
Link Status: Up
Name: vmnic3
PHYAddress: 0
Pause Autonegotiate: false
Pause RX: true
Pause TX: true
Supported Ports: TP
Supports Auto Negotiation: true
Supports Pause: true
Supports Wakeon: false
Transceiver: internal
Virtual Address: 00:50:56:59:e2:b0
Wakeon: None
And Intel has update for i350 AM2 and AM4. Who dares to try?
Intel® Ethernet Connections Boot Utility, Preboot Images, and EFI Drivers
This download version 29.0 installs UEFI drivers, Intel® Boot Agent, and Intel® iSCSI Remote Boot images to program the PCI option ROM flash image and update flash configuration options.
www.intel.com