Using Unsupported SFP+ Modules with Linux

Fri 01 November 2013
By momo

I recently got myself a Intel X520-DA2 10GBE NIC and some SFP-10G-SR+-SO SFP+ Modules to toy around with.

After assembling the PCIe card I was luckily surprised that my kernel brought up the NIC without any difficultys, so I plugged my SFP+ modules into the server, only to be greeted with:

ixgbe 0000:24:00.1: failed to load because an unsupported SFP+ module type was detected.
ixgbe 0000:24:00.1: Reload the driver after installing a supported module.

Yay. After 2 hours of useless googleing I asked a friend who happens to be a linux kernel maintainer, and luckily he knew just the fix therefore:

All you need to do is add a file to /etc/modprobe.d/:

options ixgbe allow_unsupported_sfp=1

And reload the ixgbe module:

modprobe -vr ixgbe
modprobe ixgbe

Easy as pie, at least if you know how.

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