NIC Intel C3000 SoC 1GbE

[KimTjik]

Because of the infamous bug on boards with Intel C2000 we are preparing a replacement. Fortunately we haven't encountered any bricked hardware yet.

For several reasons a better upgrade path is to choose the newer C3000, but I heard some rumors about poor support on PFsense, and I've now confirmed that it seems to affect OPNsense as well. Newer builds of FreeBSD support C3000.

So, we're now in a precarious situation: running OPNsense might get bricked and bought replacement hardware has no support. I can only blame myself for, without any further search, assume that in usual fashion Intel hardware has support.

I long story leads to a short question: is it known when down the pipe OPNsense will support C3000?

Motherboard in question: https://www.supermicro.nl/products/motherboard/atom/A2SDi-4C-HLN4F.cfm

[weust]

I've been running a C2578F for over 2 years now. Using it as my Hypervisor, with a OPNsense VM on it.
Haven't had a problem so far, so I guess I'm lucky.

"newer builds of FreeBSD". Which one is that? 12-CURRENT, 11.1-whatever?

[KimTjik]

That would be 12-current.

We're run C2558 for 2 years as well. For Supermicro motherboards the severe bug affects all which product number starts with A1.

Pretty nasty. 2578 is not on the list of affected chips.

[weust]

I thought the entire C2000 series was affected by the bug.
Lucky me.

12-CURRENT will take a while. 18.1 of OPNSENSE will get 11.1.
Iirc  12 will be able not 2019?
But perhaps some support will be back ported into 11.x.

[KimTjik]

I was of course more thinking of backporting drivers.

Since it could become a pain, since it will run on a remote location far far away, I might need to reconsider my options. I really like OPNsense and and to reconfigure everything in a new system isn't tempting.

Let's see, C3000 will be such common hardware that it might happen soon enough.

[weust]

How sweet. You think FreeBSD is quick with getting support for new hardware 😜

[KimTjik]

Honestly, I don't know what to expect and I've no experience in how well FreeBSD gets support for newer but very common hardware.

It seems like I've misunderstood the current situation: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=139429.0 It looks to be more complicated than just support for the NICs.

[franco]

Full system support is more tricky to backport than driver updates. What we could eventually try is verify with a 12-CURRENT build that hardware is working, but we can’t release this state because CURRENT is a mine field of build failures, regressions and other silly things besides the apparent progress in hardware support.

The larger issues here is the release model of FreeBSD that waits a few years to release the next major version while giving no guarantees that things will be backported to current releases. In contrast, OpenBSD forces 2 releases every year so their hardware support is quicker, rubber meeting road often and early so to say.

While we aim for the latter release engineering, being locked into FreeBSD means we wait for offficial releases as otherwise the support work for the operating system becomes increasingly hard to tackle.


Cheers,
Franco

[KimTjik]

That might unfortunately become a deal breaker.... or we could try to negotiate with the re-seller about a return of this newer hardware in exchange for some older C2000 models. There's no need for newer hardware, supporting older platforms though, with less common RAM and so forth, isn't ideal.

Who could foresee that an usually solid Intel platform would become an hazard?

[KimTjik]

The larger issues here is the release model of FreeBSD that waits a few years to release the next major version while giving no guarantees that things will be backported to current releases. In contrast, OpenBSD forces 2 releases every year so their hardware support is quicker, rubber meeting road often and early so to say.

I understand that it gets tricky at times. Checking the OpenBSD change log and support for the X550 family of NICs was added in April.