Summary
This KB article addresses an uncommon issue related to Intel ‘ixgbe’ driver support in the kernels that ship with Swarm. Specifically, there may be rare occasions where the SFP/SFP+/QSFP modules that are used in the servers in question show up as being unsupported by the ‘ixgbe’ driver.
Workaround
The symptom of this can be seen in dmesg output for the node and would look similar to the following:
...
How this argument is applied to the Swarm kernel at boot will depend on the boot management platform being used (SCS, CSN, USB boot). Consult the documentation for how this change can be applied for the appropriate boot management platformWe will cover the changes needed below for SCS for ease of reference. The steps are:
Log onto your SCS system as user ‘root’
At the command prompt, issue the following:
| Code Block |
|---|
# scsctl network_boot config set kernel.extraArgs=ixgbe.allow_unsupported_sfp=1 -d
# systemctl restart swarm-platform |
Once step 2 is complete, you can now boot the affected Swarm servers to have it take effect, at which point the ‘ixgbe’ driver will be able to load and initialize the NICs using the unlisted SFP/SFP+/QSFP modules.