The ixgbe driver did not support the 1000BASE-BX standard so for example FS.com
SFP-GE-BX 1310/1490nm 10km transceiver received an unsupported module error even
with allow_unsupported_sfp enabled.
To solve this problem I created a patch that was accepted by Linux upstream
(1b43e0d20f)
so starting from kernel 6.9 the ixgbe driver will have 1000BASE-BX support,
however VyOS uses the out of tree driver so it is necessary to backport the patch.
In-tree vs. Out-Of-Tree drivers differ in the way how unsupported transceivers
are defined (uint vs array of int) for the Kernel module parameters.
This results in:
kernel: ixgbe 0000:5e:00.0: failed to initialize because an unsupported SFP+ module type was detected.
kernel: ixgbe 0000:5e:00.0: Reload the driver after installing a supported module.
kernel: ixgbe 0000:5e:00.0: removed PHC on eth6
This patch always enables unsupported SFP+ modules as wo do anyway from
the userspace but only for the first port.
This reverts commit 78c43c2078e292ac9b53d2d6a41a47466d283914.
Unfortunately we must revert the Kernel upgrade as there are two problematic
issues. One which is the break of ABI functionality with parted [1] and second
the internal cryptop API [2] which removed required literals for the build of
Intel QAT acceleration.
In the two weeks running 5.8 we still learned a lot - we experienced a
performance improvement of ~30% when doing NAT @ > 10GBit/s and also utilizing
the build in updated drivers for Intel NICs and WireGuard.
We are looking forward to the release of this years LTS kernel and we hope to
ship this in the final 1.3 release.
1: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?h=linux-5.8.y&id=692d062655
2: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?h=linux-5.5.y&id=d63007eb95
Note: Intel does not provide a compatible QAT version. There is a custom patch
which make QAT compile for the specified Kernel version. This patch will change
the source to a non backwards-compatible version - this is fine as we run 5.8
anyways.
