Symptoms
Interfaces on BIG-IP Virtual Edition that are capable of 100gb are unusable when the default driver of xnet is used.
The following validation error will be present in /var/log/ltm
"01071ab7:3: 'not-supported' is an invalid forward-error-correction setting for Interface"
The interfaces will not report a MAC address in either of:
- tmsh list /net interfaces
- tmsh show /sys mac
Impact
Interfaces are not assigned a MAC address, therefore are unusable.
Conditions
BIG-IP Virtual Edition where the interfaces report a 100gb max speed and the xnet driver is used.
Workaround
Force the interface(s) to use a driver other then xnet.
In order to apply the workaround you will need to get 1) the available drivers and 2) the pci id of the interfaces.
The available drivers are reported using this tmctl command:
# tmctl -d blade tmm/device_probed
pci_bdf
pseudo_name type
available_drivers
driver_in_use
------------ ----------- --------- -------------------- -------------
0000:00:03.0
F5DEV_PCI mlxvf5, xnet, sock,
0000:00:05.0 1.1
F5DEV_PCI mlxvf5, xnet, sock,
xnet
0000:00:06.0 1.2
F5DEV_PCI mlxvf5, xnet, sock,
xnet
The pci id is reported with the lspci -nnvvv command:
In this example: the pci id is 15b3:101a
# lspci -nnvvv | grep -i ethernet
00:03.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Mellanox Technologies MT28800 Family [ConnectX-5 Ex Virtual Function] [15b3:101a]
00:05.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Mellanox Technologies MT28800 Family [ConnectX-5 Ex Virtual Function] [15b3:101a]
00:06.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Mellanox Technologies MT28800 Family [ConnectX-5 Ex Virtual Function] [15b3:101a]
And to force the use of a different driver you need to modify /config/tmm_init.tcl by adding a line such as:
device driver vendor_dev 15b3:101a mlxvf5
Where the last values of that line are the pci id and driver name.
