Disabling e1000 eeprom checksum

[Brianf]

Hi,

 

I'm new to unraid and have been building/configuring and testing my first unraid server, things have been going really well, the system is a dual xeon e5-2680v2 with 64gb of ecc ram, the board I am using is the Asrock Rack ep2c602-4l/d16, for some reason the PCI port (not PCIe) on this board is having an issue with every Intel PCI NIC I try to use, for some reason (I beleive BIOS releated) it blocks the ability to communicate with the eeprom on any Intel NIC I try.

 

I am fairly confident it is just a BIOS issue as I have confirmed these cards are fine on other systems using the Intel Bootutil tool, when using the same tool on the Asrock board it says "device not intitalized", this issue in turn caused a problem for Unraid in that the e1000 driver probe throws a checksum error and then sets the cards MAC to all 0's which prevents operation.

 

The cards themselves do show up as devices in Unraid, and if I boot Windows directly they will function (as Windows doesn't care about checksum), I have read several Linux posts and this is a well know problem, fixes/workarounds are listed and I have tried include

 

1. Stubbing the card and passing it to a VM - this causes a device manager error in windows, did not investiagte further as not what I really want to do.

2. Use modeprobe -r to unload the e1000 module, then use modprobe eeprom_bad_csum_allow=1 - seems to have no effect

3. Add e1000.eeprom_bad_csum_allow=1 to the syslinux append line - has no effect, mu append line looks like

'append vfio-pci.ids=1b73:1100 isolcpus=4-9,14-19,24-29,34-39 xen-pciback.hide=(10:00.0)(14:00.0)(15:00.0) e1000.eeprom_bad_csum_allow=1 initrd=/bzroot'.

4. Recompile the module with the checksum documented out - have not yet done as this is trickier to do on unraid than other linux distro's and more of a hack than I really wanted to do.

 

I have passed all details on to Asrock who are investigating why the board is behaving this way but it's been over a week with no feedback as yet apart from it will take some time as they don't have ready access to PCI network cards apparently.

 

This board has 4 onboard NIC's so this isssue is by no means a showstopper and I can use the xen-pciback.hide= to allow passthrough of the individual interfaces, however I would like if possible to run the unraid server off the PCI NIC and have the 4 other interfaces stubbed for other projects.

 

I am hoping one of you may be able to confirm if the eeprom checksum can be disabled without having to recompile the e1000 module.

 

Thanks Brian

Edited September 1, 2018 by Brianf
unfinished