I225-V BSOD with virtualization features enabled on Win11

[funkyd]

Hello,

I have a relatively new Windows 11 build and receive a kernel security check failure BSOD when attempting to update from the older v1 NDIS miniport driver to the latest v2 NetAdapter miniport driver.

I've narrowed this down to Windows virtualization... uninstalling Windows Subsystem for Linux and Windows Sandbox allows the v2.1.1.7 ethernet driver to install and the system appears to be stable. However, installing either the WSL or WSB features results in the above BSOD upon the 2nd reboot. If either WSL or WSB are already installed when attempting the update from v1.0.2.22 to v2.1.1.7 of the ethernet driver, the BSOD happens immediately.

Could someone verify the above happens in a test environment as well? Below are my system specs:

Asus Prime Z690-A Motherboard

Intel i9-12900K CPU (default clockspeeds)

32GB Crucial DDR5 memory

NVidia RTX 3090 GPU

Samsung 980 Pro 2TB and Samsung 960 Pro 2TB NVME SSDs

Asus ThunderboltEX4 Add-on card

Apollo Twin MK2 Duo TB audio interface

Windows 11 Pro

Latest Windows updates and driver updates installed

An additional note: I've disabled most non-critical drivers such as the Apollo, as well as software drivers such as OpenVPN, during my testing. Enabling the virtualization features appears to be the root cause of the BSODs.

If you need any additional information please let me know. I realize this latest driver is still not available via Asus, and I've been using the older v1 driver in the meantime, which works without issue.

[funkyd]

Hello, thank you for the reply.

I did not do anything to enable RSS, it seemed to be enabled automatically. Running the command get-netadapterrss -name ethernet from PowerShell showed RSS was enabled in Windows.

If you have any other questions please let me know.

[Zigfreid_Intel]

Hello funkyd,

Thank you very much for advising. We will inform this to our engineers and have this further checked. 

Is it okay if we can ask for another 2-3 business days to provide you an update? If you have a preferred date please advise us. We thank you for your patience and understanding and we hope you have a nice day!

Best regards,

Zigfreid I.

Intel® Customer Support

[Zigfreid_Intel]

Hello funkyd,

We do apologize for the delay since we will not be able to provide you an update today, as the case is still escalated to our engineers and its currently being further investigated. Rest assure that we are closely monitoring this case and once an update is available we will notify you immediately. 

We would like to ask for more time for this, is it okay if we can ask for another 2-3 business days to provide you an update? We thank you for your patience and understanding and we hope you have a nice day!

Best regards,

Zigfreid I.

Intel® Customer Support

[Zigfreid_Intel]

Hello funkyd,

Firstly we do apologize for the delay and for any inconvenience that we have caused. As per checking with our engineers, they have advised that the RSS option is not supported for I225. If you were able to get the information from Microsoft, we would recommend to check this concern with OS manufacturer as well.

If you have questions or other clarifications please let us know so we can help you further.

Awaiting to hear from you soon, should there be no response from you, I’ll make sure to reach out after 3 business days. Thank you and have a nice day!

Best regards,

Zigfreid I.

Intel® Customer Support

[funkyd]

Hello,

I understand that RSS is not supported for the i225, but as I mentioned earlier, I did not do anything to enable RSS at the OS level when installing the drivers on Windows 11. RSS was enabled by default when running the previously mentioned commands in PowerShell. According to Microsoft's documentation , the driver should be able to disable RSS support at the OS level. I'm not sure if this is an Intel or Microsoft problem, but it is easily replicated and I would think Intel has resources at Microsoft to help solve this issue if it indeed is an issue between the driver and Windows 11.

The fact remains that under a clean installation of Windows 11, installing the latest i225 drivers and then enabling virtualization causes a BSOD. Manually disabling RSS via PowerShell before driver installation or before installation of virtualization features such as Hyper-V is indeed a workaround, but the average user shouldn't be required to do something like this.

Thank you again for your response, and if you need any additional information please let me know!

[Zigfreid_Intel]

Hello funkyd,

Thank you for responding and advising. We will try to have this further check again with our engineers however we have no guarantees for a fix or recommendations that we can further provide since this has been already investigated by our engineers however we would still try to check for any other recommendations.

Please provide us some time to have this further check, is it okay if we can ask for another 2-3 business days to provide you an update? if you have a preferred date please advise us instead. Thank you and have a nice day!

Best regards,

Zigfreid I.

Intel® Customer Support

[Zigfreid_Intel]

Hello funkyd,

We do apologize for the delay since we will not be able to provide you an update today, as the case is still escalated to our engineers and its currently being further investigated. Rest assure that we are closely monitoring this case and once an update is available we will notify you immediately. 

We would like to ask for more time for this, is it okay if we can ask for another 2-3 business days to provide you an update? We thank you for your patience and understanding and we hope you have a nice day!

Best regards,

Zigfreid I.

Intel® Customer Support

[Zigfreid_Intel]

Hello funkyd,

We do apologize for the delay since we will not be able to provide you an update today, as the case is still escalated to our engineers and its currently being further investigated. Rest assure that we are closely monitoring this case and once an update is available we will notify you immediately. 

We would like to ask for more time for this, is it okay if we can ask for another 2-3 business days to provide you an update? We thank you for your patience and understanding and we hope you have a nice day!

Best regards,

Zigfreid I.

Intel® Customer Support

[Zigfreid_Intel]

Hello funkyd,

We do apologize for the delay since we will not be able to provide you an update today, as the case is still escalated to our engineers and its currently being further investigated. Rest assure that we are closely monitoring this case and once an update is available we will notify you immediately. 

We would like to ask for more time for this, is it okay if we can ask for another 2-3 business days to provide you an update? We thank you for your patience and understanding and we hope you have a nice day!

Best regards,

Zigfreid I.

Intel® Customer Support

[Zigfreid_Intel]

Hello funkyd,

We do apologize for the delay since we will not be able to provide you an update today, as the case is still escalated to our engineers and its currently being further investigated. Rest assure that we are closely monitoring this case and once an update is available we will notify you immediately. 

We would like to ask for more time for this, is it okay if we can ask for another 2-3 business days to provide you an update? We thank you for your patience and understanding and we hope you have a nice day!

Best regards,

Zigfreid I.

Intel® Customer Support

[Zigfreid_Intel]

Hello funkyd,

We do apologize for the delay since we will not be able to provide you an update today, as the case is still escalated to our engineers and its currently being further investigated. Rest assure that we are closely monitoring this case and once an update is available we will notify you immediately. 

We would like to ask for more time for this, is it okay if we can ask for another 2-3 business days to provide you an update? We thank you for your patience and understanding and we hope you have a nice day!

Best regards,

Zigfreid I.

Intel® Customer Support

[Zigfreid_Intel]

Hello funkyd,

Firstly we do apologize for the delay and for any inconvenience in providing you an update since the case was escalated to our engineers to further check your concern. 

We have received an update with our engineers and they have advised that after series of verifications, the I225 controller does not really support RSS. 

The RSS is one of the root cause and was enabled at the OS level when installing the drivers on Windows 11 and have disabled it using Microsoft documentation cmdlets. 

Our engineers were not able to replicate the issue on Alder Lake systems and we do apologize however we cannot provide any further recommendation for this and it would be best if you can reach out to Microsoft for this issue instead. 

If you have questions or other clarifications please let us know so we can help you further.

Awaiting to hear from you soon, should there be no response from you, I’ll make sure to reach out after 3 business days. Thank you and have a nice day!

Best regards,

Zigfreid I.

Intel® Customer Support

[Zigfreid_Intel]

Hello funkyd,

Good day! We hope that you are having a great one so far.

We'd like to know if you have any other questions or clarifications please let us know so we would know if we can close the thread.

Hoping to hear from you soon.

We will wait for your reply within 3 business days in case we don't hear from you, we will proceed closing this request.

Best regards,

Zigfreid I.

Intel® Customer Support

[funkyd]

Hello,

Thank you for your response. It's unfortunate the engineers weren't able to replicate this issue, as others have mentioned the same problem in this thread as well as in a thread on Asus's forums. After some more testing, I've found that certain v1 drivers (such as v1.0.2.22) enable RSS, and upgrading to v2 drivers (such as v2.1.1.7) does not disable RSS and hence the BSOD's appear when virtualization features are installed. RSS remains enabled unless it is disabled via PowerShell or the drivers are manually removed and the ethernet adapter is deleted via device manager.

I have been up and running fine after making the changes I noted earlier in this thread, and hopefully this thread will help others if no warnings are mentioned in release notes. I still believe this is an issue with Intel's drivers, as the drivers are not disabling RSS during installation. I am not a programmer, but this seems to be possible as mentioned in Microsoft's NetAdapterCx Documentation.

Thanks again for your time.

[bording]

I am having the exact same problem with the NetAdapterCx drivers for the I225-V, so I have been watching this thread with great interest, hoping to see an actual resolution and and updated set of drivers.

Needless to say, I'm rather disappointed with the latest round of communication here, which seems to be another instance of "engineers being too indirectly involved in the thread to actually understand the problem being reported."

Yes, we know the I225 controller doesn't support RSS. I don't think anyone here is trying to say otherwise. That isn't the problem. The problem is the 2.x NetAdapterCx driver not doing the correct thing, so Windows is enabling RSS when it shouldn't be.

The older 1.x drivers that have been reported here and on other forums as working are based on NDIS and not the newer NetAdapterCx, so they would have a completely different way of reporting RSS capabilities.

Zigfreid, who are the engineers that you've been talking to? Are they the people who actually write the drivers? Unless they are claiming that the NetAdapterCx driver is correctly disabling RSS according to the documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/netcx/netadaptercx-receive-side-scaling-rss) and it's still being enabled, it's hard to see how this could be Microsoft's problem.

Given that the NDIS drivers work and the NetAdapterCx drivers don't, I still think a closer look needs to be taken at what the newer driver is doing.

[Zigfreid_Intel]

Hello funkyd,

Thank you very much for responding and understanding the situation. We would also like to know if you have other concerns? If none, can we already proceed in closing this thread? Please do advise us. 

Hoping to hear from you soon.

Should there be no response from you, I’ll make sure to reach out after 3 business days

Best regards,

Zigfreid I.

Intel® Customer Support

Hello bording, 

We do apologize if your also experiencing the same issue. The engineers that we are referring on this case is on our side (Intel). They have already done a series of validation and unfortunately we are unable to provide any further recommendations since they have detected that the root cause is already at an OS level and it would be best if you can also reach out to Microsoft for this issue instead. If you wish to further continue or have other concerns please create a separate thread instead. Thank you and have a nice day!

Best regards,

Zigfreid I.

Intel® Customer Support

[funkyd]

Certain versions of Intel's NDIS enable RSS at the OS level automatically, so I'm not sure why the NetAdapter drivers cannot disable RSS automatically as described in Microsoft's documentation. If this is already programmed into the NetAdapter drivers, it's an issue between Intel and Microsoft, not an issue for an end user who has no control over driver programming.

In any case, I've done all I could to provide all of this information. I feel bad for any users who run into these BSODs in the future and cannot find the solution in this thread.

[bording]

I had the NDIS driver installed originally because there was no other driver available when I first installed Windows 11, so that was definitely the problem I ran into. RSS was still enabled while using the newer NetAdapterCx driver.

It's a shame that Intel seems uninterested in actually doing anything more to fix a problem that is clearly their fault when their own driver is the reason RSS was enabled in the first place, especially considering that early adopters had to use the NDIS driver since that was the only driver available.

The only way I found your thread in the first place was because I was able to dig into the crash dump and saw the references to rxscaling.cpp that I was able to search for. Definitely not something I'd expect the average user to be able to do. Hopefully anyone actually wanting to use Hyper-V is more than average!

[funkyd]

I am finding other threads where people are unable to boot into Hyper-V with Alder Lake systems, and I'm wondering if the root cause is this RSS issue. I've replied to a few other forums to see if people can test this solution.

I also wonder if Intel is prematurely labeling the I225 as incompatible with RSS when, in this case at least, the issues seem to stem from the E-Cores and Microsoft not ignoring them automatically as it does for the Hyperthreaded cores. If that is indeed the root cause, it's yet another problem that should be sorted out between Microsoft and Intel, not Microsoft and an end user with limited resources.

[Zigfreid_Intel]

Hello funkyd and bording,

We understand your predicament and we do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. However, it is best to contact Microsoft first regarding the issue so they may also provide some recommendations. If it is indeed an issue with Microsoft, they might further check and coordinate with us (Intel). However as previously stated, the I225 controller does not really support RSS and we were not able to replicate the issue on Alder Lake systems.

Since we can no longer provide any further recommendations on our end we will be needing to close the case. For future concerns feel free to post a new question as this thread will no longer be monitored. Thank you and have a nice day!

Best regards,

Zigfreid I.

Intel® Customer Support

[DarthMeh]

This thread is insane.

There's clearly an issue with the Intel i225-V NetAdapter drivers + RSS + WSL, and Intel seems more interested in closing the ticket than actually fixing the issue. If it's a Microsoft issue, Intel has a lot more clout to fix it than a few forum users do.

RIP for all the Intel consumers who upgrade their drivers and find their PC crashes constantly. Terrible customer service.