Solarish 10GBE compatibility

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blood

Member
Apr 20, 2017
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I am converting an X9SCM-f from Proxmox duties into a dedicated NAS. I had intended to run OpenIndiana Hipster on it, and got that installed a bit ago. I was pretty shocked to see that my ConnectX-2 10GBE adapter wasn't recognized, and after doing a bit of spelunking on the web, found this thread that basically says it doesn't work in Illumos. I'm pretty sure I've used one of these cards in Oracle Solaris before so I guess going back to that is an option - but I had wanted to stick with the free stuff as it seems to get better support these days.

I also have a spare dual port Chelsio N320E that I could try, but I don't see that on the HCL either. I'm willing to admit that I've gone cheap on 10GBE as it seemed that the cheap stuff was good enough before - Linux always ate up whatever I threw at it and performed pretty well!

Thoughts on what I should do? Has anybody gotten either of these boards to work with an Illumos system lately? I don't mind running Oracle Solaris if that's the path of least resistance - and I could buy another NIC if I should expect the support for my current NICs to get worse - but I'd rather not.

I do prefer to stick with Solaris for this task as I'm fond of the integrated ZFS+iSCSI stack. So I'm not really considering FreeBSD (including FreeNAS) or Linux for this.
 
Jan 4, 2014
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I am converting an X9SCM-f from Proxmox duties into a dedicated NAS. I had intended to run OpenIndiana Hipster on it, and got that installed a bit ago. I was pretty shocked to see that my ConnectX-2 10GBE adapter wasn't recognized, and after doing a bit of spelunking on the web, found this thread that basically says it doesn't work in Illumos. I'm pretty sure I've used one of these cards in Oracle Solaris before so I guess going back to that is an option - but I had wanted to stick with the free stuff as it seems to get better support these days.

I also have a spare dual port Chelsio N320E that I could try, but I don't see that on the HCL either. I'm willing to admit that I've gone cheap on 10GBE as it seemed that the cheap stuff was good enough before - Linux always ate up whatever I threw at it and performed pretty well!

Thoughts on what I should do? Has anybody gotten either of these boards to work with an Illumos system lately? I don't mind running Oracle Solaris if that's the path of least resistance - and I could buy another NIC if I should expect the support for my current NICs to get worse - but I'd rather not.

I do prefer to stick with Solaris for this task as I'm fond of the integrated ZFS+iSCSI stack. So I'm not really considering FreeBSD (including FreeNAS) or Linux for this.
Buy an intel x520-da2 ;)

send from a mobile device, so typo's are to be expected :)
 

blood

Member
Apr 20, 2017
42
14
8
44
I installed the Chelsio NIC and it wasn't recognized either, but I download Solaris drivers from their site and installed them. This worked! I then configured some VLAN tags, IP addresses, customized MTUs, etc and had it all working like a champ - then I rebooted, and while the config is all present in /etc/dladm/... and /etc/ipadm/... the interfaces didn't come up and I can't get them to work unless I delete it all and start over again - at which point it still won't work after a reboot. The IPs show as disabled, but "ipadm enable-ip ..." won't let me bring them up.

I'm apparently asking too much of OpenIndiana.

I'll give Solaris 11.3 a try now and see if it behaves any better. I suspect it will, but we'll see. If it doesn't, I'll start trolling eBay looking for deals on Intel 10GBE adapters.

On a side note: I'm not a fan of the newish way to configure networking in Solaris. Maybe I'm showing my age here, but there is nothing wrong with ifconfig and editing text config files.
 

blood

Member
Apr 20, 2017
42
14
8
44
Everything I wanted to do is working fine under Oracle Solaris 11.3 so far and I'm happily rsync'ing a couple terabytes of data across the network to it now at a few gbps. This is probably where I'm going to settle. I'd rather be running Illumos, but eh, whatever.

I'm surprised that these really common boards that have/had drivers for Sun/Oracle Solaris aren't supported now, but I guess this is just a factor of the smaller developer community with the skills to work this sort of thing.
 

gea

Well-Known Member
Dec 31, 2010
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Many Chelsio Nics are supported in Illumos (NexentaStor, OmniOS, OpenIndiana or SmartOS)
illumos HCL - WIP

Driver support of Oracle Solaris is independent from Illumos and requires sometimes a support contract.