X540 losing connection on receive

[zachj]

I’ve got a quad port silicom x540-t4 nic that seems to work just fine when uploading/sending data but not when receiving data.

It’s in a pfsense 2.7.2 box.

When it comes up from a fresh boot all the ports are active and working and my clients get dhcp addresses and can ping the router and other hosts.

If I run iperf with a client connected to any port on the x540 (and a server connected to my i225 mic) it works just fine.

if I run iperf with a client connected to any a port on my i225 nic and a server connected to any port on the x540 nic the server will lose its network connection after the first or second iperf interval.

This is repeatable 100% of the time.

The link lights stay active but every machine connected to the x540 loses its connection. If I release/renew ip on any of them they fail to get a dhcp address.

I can recover 100% of the time by rebooting pfsense (but not rerooting) or by doing ifconfig ixN down; ifconfig ixN up.

I’m thinking this is a “driver doesn’t match firmware” problem but I’ll be damned if I can find any firmware for the card.

anyone got good ideas?

 

[CyklonDX]

You can use

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

and extract firmware image from dell files (do note it will flash dell branded intel version)


also keep in mind this may be a fake x540.

 

[MountainBofh]

Boot the system off a linux USB drive and see if iperf3 causes the same issues or not. Rule out OS/driver issues that way.

I'm guessing the card is going bad.

 

[zachj]

I’ll try. Nvmupdate64e doesn’t seem to like the card or the dell firmwares.

the card worked 9 months ago. Then I moved out for a home remodel. When I came back it wasn’t working anymore. It was powered off the whole time…