Mellanox OFED drives not working correctly in ESXi 6.0U3 Patch 22?

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WANg

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Jun 10, 2018
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Folks -

Does anyone here use Mellanox ConnectX3 cards with ESXi 6.0 U3 Patch 22 or above? I installed OFED v2.4 (the latest version available for this card and can support SRIOV), removed the native drivers (nmlx4_core, nmxl4_en and nmxl4_rdma), and for some reason the cards are not showing up on the admin web console after a reboot. The drivers are installed, the modules show up as enabled when I do an

esxcli system module list

When I do a software inventory with:

esxcli software vib list | grep MEL

It shows the driver as installed...

And lspci shows the cards as present.

Update: Hmmm...Crap.
Looks like mlx4_core is puking up on driver init.

INI:
2020-05-01T19:24:43.199Z cpu0:33146)PCI: driver mlx4_core is looking for devices                                                                                                                                                                                                    
<6>mlx4_core: Mellanox ConnectX core driver v1.1 (Jan 31 2016)                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
2020-05-01T19:24:43.199Z cpu0:33146)<6>mlx4_core: Initializing 0000:01:00.0                                                                                                                                                                                                        
2020-05-01T19:24:43.199Z cpu0:33146)DMA: 646: DMA Engine 'vmklnxpci-0:1:0.0' created using mapper 'DMANull'.                                                                                                                                                                        
2020-05-01T19:24:43.199Z cpu0:33146)DMA: 646: DMA Engine 'vmklnxpci-0:1:0.0' created using mapper 'DMANull'.                                                                                                                                                                        
2020-05-01T19:24:43.199Z cpu0:33146)DMA: 646: DMA Engine 'vmklnxpci-0:1:0.0' created using mapper 'DMANull'.                                                                                                                                                                        
2020-05-01T19:24:43.199Z cpu0:33146)DMA: 691: DMA Engine 'vmklnxpci-0:1:0.0' destroyed.                                                                                                                                                                                            
2020-05-01T19:24:48.256Z cpu6:33146)<4>si_meminfo called, stub!                                                                                                                                                                                                                    
2020-05-01T19:24:48.867Z cpu6:33146)vmklinux: alloc_pages:1010: This message has repeated 1 times: gfp_mask=0x202d2, order=0x0, vmk_PktSlabAllocPage returned 'Out of memory'                                                                                                      
2020-05-01T19:24:48.867Z cpu6:33146)vmklinux: alloc_pages:1010: This message has repeated 2 times: gfp_mask=0x202d2, order=0x0, vmk_PktSlabAllocPage returned 'Out of memory'                                                                                                      
2020-05-01T19:24:48.955Z cpu6:33146)<3>mlx4_core 0000:01:00.0: Failed to map MCG context memory, aborting.                                                                                                                                                                          
2020-05-01T19:24:49.972Z cpu6:33146)WARNING: vmklinux: pci_announce_device:1486: PCI: driver mlx4_core probe failed for device 0000:01:00.0                                                                                                                                        
2020-05-01T19:24:49.972Z cpu6:33146)LinPCI: LinuxPCI_DeviceUnclaimed:257: Device 0000:01:00.0 unclaimed.                                                                                                                                                                            
2020-05-01T19:24:49.972Z cpu6:33146)PCI: driver mlx4_core claimed 0 device                                                                                                                                                                                                          
2020-05-01T19:24:49.972Z cpu6:33146)Mod: 4947: Initialization of mlx4_core succeeded with module ID 4126.                                                                                                                                                                          
2020-05-01T19:24:49.972Z cpu6:33146)mlx4_core loaded successfully.
Not sure why it is doing that - nmlx4 (the "native" 6.0 drivers) works just fine on the card, but this one just seem to faceplant pretty badly.
 
Last edited:

WANg

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Jun 10, 2018
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Okay, figured it out.

It turns out that the latest Mellanox OFED drivers (2.4.0) does not play well with the hardware in question - removed it, replaced it with 1.9 and the drivers loaded fine this time around. Although I just upgraded to 6.5 so the MLNX OFED 2.4 might need to go back in again.
 
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klui

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Feb 3, 2019
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Are you installing it because you're using Infiniband and SR-IOV? ESXi 7 recognizes the CX3 natively. I have no need for SR-IOV but I don't use IB either.
 

WANg

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I was doing SR-IOV testing. The native ConnectX-3 drivers (nmlx4) does not and will not support SR-IOV.