Using Unsupported SFP+ Modules With FreeBSD

Fri 15 November 2013
By momo

If an error like this shows up in your logfiles:

ix0: <Intel(R) PRO/10GbE PCI-Express Network Driver, Version - 2.5.15>
ix0: Unsupported SFP+ Module

I might be able to help.
It’s not as straight forward as with linux, but we’ll make it work.
First off we need to modify the sourcecode of /usr/src/sys/dev/ixgbe/ixgbe.c as follows:

static int allow_unsupported_sfp = TRUE;

And then we need to recompile the kernel module:

cd /usr/src/sys/modules/ixgbe && make install

and then reboot our system.
If everything goes well the interface will show up somewhat like this when executing ifconfig:

ix0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
        options=407bb<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,JUMBO_MTU,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4,TSO6,LRO,VLAN_HWTSO>
        ether 00:1b:21:90:a4:98
        nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
        media: Ethernet autoselect (10Gbase-SR <full-duplex>)
        status: active

UPDATE: I just discovered a more convinient way to achieve the same result:

in /boot/loader.conf set:

hw.ixgbe.unsupported_sfp=1

and reboot.

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