Can I get the mlxen driver to work?

[downingjosh]

I got ahold of an HP G2 10GB card (a Mellanox ConnectX-2 in disguise), but there doesn't seem to be any official vendor support for FreeBSD (though they are supposed to release drivers for the ConnectX-3 at the end of this August for FreeBSD 10).

I saw this post about NAS4Free and wondered (since they're both based on FreeBSD 9.x) if this could work on FreeNAS 9.2.16:
http://sourceforge.net/p/nas4free/feature-requests/33/

Is there some way I can compile the driver to work on FreeNAS, or do I just need to get a different card? I tried doing it on my own, but I'm either doing something wrong, or it's just not possible.

 

[cyberjock]

Honestly,

Just get a different card.

Notice that the feature request is more than a year old, still not assigned and still not completed. Probably a good reason for that. ;)

 

[downingjosh]

Yeah, I figured that'd be the case. Wanted to run it by the brilliant and beautiful people in this excellent forum before I gave up on it. I ordered a pair of Intel X520-DA2 cards to replace the Mellanox ones. It'll be nice to have the SR-IOV and VMDq.

 

[dlavigne]

As a side-note, looks like the FreeNAS feature request is at https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/2014.

 

[downingjosh]

That's good see. I wouldn't want them to try & shoe-horn in something without any vendor support though; I'm sure the devs have much more important things to spend their time on!

It would be good see it available when FreeNAS hits FreeBSD v10, since Mellanox is releasing those drivers here in a few weeks. More hardware options are always nice to have.

 

[dlavigne]

Post the URL when the drivers become available as we do have a 10.x testing branch (even though release won't be until some time next year).

 

[downingjosh]

Will do! The drivers will be for the ConnectX-3 devices and newer, but they may very well function on the ConnectX-2 and older too.

 

[downingjosh]

Post the URL when the drivers become available as we do have a 10.x testing branch (even though release won't be until some time next year).

Looks like they were released a few days ago. I don't have the card anymore, so I can't try it out myself. Hopefully this works well & can expand some 10GBe options for everyone.

Also, these will work on the Connect-X 2 cards as well, which is great news.

http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=193&mtag=freebsd_driver

 

[c0re]

Has anybody had a chance to try this? These cards are fantastically cheap and you can find them as low as $35 on Ebay now.

Plus with FreeNAS 9.3 being build on FreeBSD 10 it seems like it should work given that Mellanox has made a driver for these cards.

 

[dlavigne]

Plus with FreeNAS 9.3 being build on FreeBSD 10 it seems like it should work given that Mellanox has made a driver for these cards.

Note that FreeNAS 9.3 is built on FreeBSD 9.3...

 

[c0re]

Note that FreeNAS 9.3 is built on FreeBSD 9.3...

Actually I suppose that makes complete sense now doesn't it? Must have been getting it confused with pfSense moving to FreeBSD 10. Thanks for the correction

 

[wreedps]

Do the Mellanox ConnectX3 cards work in the latest stable release?

 

[dlavigne]

Not sure. The driver is mlx(4) and if you search for that at https://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.3R/hardware.html, it lists the known supported cards and mentions that others should work but haven't been verified. If someone has the hardware and tries it, let us know what luck you have with it.