5 ms·

I have had a lot of trouble with the Marvell AQtion controllers under Linux. They are supposed to work and are plug and play on modern kernels, but I was never

I have had a lot of trouble with the Marvell AQtion controllers under Linux. They are supposed to work and are plug and play on modern kernels, but I was never able to resolve a bug where the controller stopped working after a few hours. The only resolution I found was rebooting, which made the controller not very useful. The Intel 10GbE controllers are more expensive, but much better in my experience. For anyone looking for an alternative, I use an M.2 to PCI-e slot riser and a regular HHHL PCI-e card. Example product: https://www.amazon.com/ADT-Link-Extension-Support-Channel-Mining/dp/B07XMK7ZCR/ref=sr_1_9 https://www.amazon.com/ADT-Link-Extension-Support-Channel-Mi...

omgtehlion 5y ago
If you do not need a cable, there are m.2 to 4x PCIe (open slot, so you can insert 8x and 16x cards) for $5.
- loosescrews 5y ago
  I wasn't able to find any of those that support PCI-e 3.0. Both the Marvel and Intel controllers discussed in this thread are PCI-e 3.0.
  - omgtehlion 5y ago
    https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002996748461.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002996748461.html ↑ this one does support gen3. Anyhow, with 4x@gen2 you’ll be fine at 10G speeds (I checked). Gen3 is strictly needed only if you want 2 (or 4) ports, or 25G...
walterbell 5y ago
Thanks for the pointer, those are difficult to find via search.
- martijnvds 5y ago
  ADT-Link[0] makes a lot of them, with the cable coming out left, right or "front" of the M.2 card, and with the PCIe slots in all kinds of orientations. [0] http://www.adt.link/ http://www.adt.link/
xroche 5y ago
Same experience with a bunch of Aquantia AQC-107 (ASUS XG-C100C). Had to remove them from a Linux server, it just won't work and botch IPv6 traffic (especially routing advertisement notices ?!). Got Intel x550t2 and all the issues miraculously disappeared.
- devttyeu 5y ago
  I have this controller, and I was able to mostly workaround the dying issue by having a cron script ping a network device every minute, and when that fails it restarts the link - `ip l set enp70s0 down; sleep 6; ip l set enp70s0 up`. But that's acceptable only because that machine has a workload which can tolerate not having network access for a few minutes per day or so.
  - NavinF 5y ago
    Damn that’s nasty. I wish there was a way to flag known issues on every product that contains garbage chips like this.
seany 5y ago
I'm using the linked adapter to put mellanox connectx2's into NUCs. Haven't found a good case solution yet, but it all works fine.
jagrsw 5y ago
If someone wants to buy additional 10G card, and has ~300 USD to spare I suggest Intel E810 series. The cheapest E810 version is, I believe, E810-XXVDA2 which has 2x28Gb SFP ports (so good for the future), and uses PCIE4, which makes it work with 10Gbps bandwidths even in x1 ports (though the card is physically x8 in size, so you need an open x1 port), and sometimes you have just a lonely x1 on your MB if you use the rest for 3 gfx cards for god-knows-what purpose :)

omgtehlion 5y ago

If you do not need a cable, there are m.2 to 4x PCIe (open slot, so you can insert 8x and 16x cards) for $5.

loosescrews 5y ago
I wasn't able to find any of those that support PCI-e 3.0. Both the Marvel and Intel controllers discussed in this thread are PCI-e 3.0.
- omgtehlion 5y ago
  https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002996748461.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002996748461.html ↑ this one does support gen3. Anyhow, with 4x@gen2 you’ll be fine at 10G speeds (I checked). Gen3 is strictly needed only if you want 2 (or 4) ports, or 25G...

walterbell 5y ago

Thanks for the pointer, those are difficult to find via search.

martijnvds 5y ago
ADT-Link[0] makes a lot of them, with the cable coming out left, right or "front" of the M.2 card, and with the PCIe slots in all kinds of orientations. [0] http://www.adt.link/ http://www.adt.link/

xroche 5y ago

Same experience with a bunch of Aquantia AQC-107 (ASUS XG-C100C). Had to remove them from a Linux server, it just won't work and botch IPv6 traffic (especially routing advertisement notices ?!). Got Intel x550t2 and all the issues miraculously disappeared.

devttyeu 5y ago
I have this controller, and I was able to mostly workaround the dying issue by having a cron script ping a network device every minute, and when that fails it restarts the link - `ip l set enp70s0 down; sleep 6; ip l set enp70s0 up`. But that's acceptable only because that machine has a workload which can tolerate not having network access for a few minutes per day or so.
- NavinF 5y ago
  Damn that’s nasty. I wish there was a way to flag known issues on every product that contains garbage chips like this.

seany 5y ago

I'm using the linked adapter to put mellanox connectx2's into NUCs. Haven't found a good case solution yet, but it all works fine.

jagrsw 5y ago

If someone wants to buy additional 10G card, and has ~300 USD to spare I suggest Intel E810 series. The cheapest E810 version is, I believe, E810-XXVDA2 which has 2x28Gb SFP ports (so good for the future), and uses PCIE4, which makes it work with 10Gbps bandwidths even in x1 ports (though the card is physically x8 in size, so you need an open x1 port), and sometimes you have just a lonely x1 on your MB if you use the rest for 3 gfx cards for god-knows-what purpose :)