SR-IOV drivers for 82576 and 82599

[idata]

Hi,

I am trying to test a board for virtualization with the 1G 82576 and 10G 82599 Ethernet controllers on board.

The focus is purely to develop a test (like external loopback) to determine if all the virtual functions would work as expected when SR-IOV is enabled within the BIOS.

I would not be running any Guest OS as part of this.

The board is running RedHat Linux Enterprise Server 5.3 (Kernel - 2.6.18).

My questions are -

1. Is it required to install virtualization package for RedHat Linux - Zen or KVM ? There would be no guest OS and would like to use Linux to test the virtual and physical interfaces?

2. I have the opensource SR-IOV drivers for the controllers. Is it sufficient to load these drivers on RH 5.3 and not have any kernel support as explained in my first question?

Thank You!

Kris

[Patrick_K_Intel1]

RedHat 5.4 Xen has SR-IOV support for the 82576, however there are some kernel issues that make performance slow. Release 5.5 fixed these and added support for the 82599 - however an important patch was missing, so a zstream release to 5.5 fixed this.

SR-IOV is a technology that requires support from pretty much everything including BIOS, platform (chipset), VMM and NIC. Red Hat does not have SR-IOV support in 5.3.

I have a SR-IOV primer document you may find useful for some background information: http://download.intel.com/design/network/applnots/321211.pdf http://download.intel.com/design/network/applnots/321211.pdf

and another BLOG discussing how to setup SR-IOV in RH 5.4: /community/wired/blog/2010/03/01/setting-up-red-hat-54-xen-for-sr-iov-using-the-intel-82576-gbe http://communities.intel.com/community/wired/blog/2010/03/01/setting-up-red-hat-54-xen-for-sr-iov-using-the-intel-82576-gbe

[idata]

Hi, now I am doing test about sr-iov. I can setup vfs using 82576 and pass it to VMs. However, when I change it to 82599, no VF appears any more. If I use "dmesg" to see what happens, it displays "not enough MMIO resource for SR-IOV" , first ,we think that it may be caused by the OS, but we have tried several OS including Centos 5.4(i386 and X64),5.6, REDHAT 5.5,5.6 and the problem remains.Now we really don't know what's the problem.Thanks very much!

[Patrick_K_Intel1]

Closing this thread, as it is active here:

/message/132184# 132184 http://communities.intel.com/message/132184# 132184