Hi,

Centos 8.4

Network card: Qlogic QLE8442, it is seen as:
0a:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM57840 NetXtreme II 10 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 11)

Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X470-PRO

I cannot get sriov vf working. IOMMU and SR-IOV enabled in BIOS. Using latest BIOS version.

When I do:
echo 8 > sriov_numvfs

I get:
[root@vh4 device]# echo 8 > sriov_numvfs
bash: echo: write error: Input/output error

in /var/log messages I then get:
un 28 23:08:55 vh4 kernel: pci 0000:0a:01.0: [14e4:16ad] type 7f class 0xffffff
Jun 28 23:08:55 vh4 kernel: pci 0000:0a:01.0: unknown header type 7f, ignoring device
Jun 28 23:08:57 vh4 kernel: [bnx2x_enable_sriov:2520(enp10s0f0)]pci_enable_sriov failed with -5

I have no idea what to change to get it working.

If anybody has any clue what to do, I would be very happy

Regards,
Olaf

Hi, olaf_f & welcome to LQ.

Have a read of this:How_To_Ask_a_Question

Now let's try with the little information we have. What is SR-IOV and why does it matter?

Your command will try to write the number "8" to a file called sriov_numvfs in whatever directory you happen to be in. Is that what you intended? From your error, it failed.

What exactly were you trying to do? Does your network card work?

Try to find online what module and firmware are used for this.

1 members found this post helpful.

There appear to be several things you have to do in order to enable that:
https://access.redhat.com/documentat...ual-networking
https://www.supermicro.com/wdl/drive...ADME.bnx2x.TXT

..but as business_kid says, we need more information.

To be honest, I included the distribution, it's version, hardware description - both motherboard and network card. Even the driver is known: bnx2x. What more would you like?

The IOMMU is enabled and detected by kernel. I wanted to post dmesg output and lspci -vvv but it is way too long for the limit of the message here and I don't see a possibility to attach a file.

To business_kid:

SRIOV - single root input/output virtualization - it enables to create virtual functions on PCIe devices, so they can be shared with virtual machines in a secure way, without performance degradation.
The support is required from PCIe motherboard hardware, BIOS, kernel, the driver and the PCIe device - in this case the network card.

sriov_numvfs - it is a file in /sys directory for the network card. It is used to enable virtual functions on these NICs. The "8" when written to this file should enable 8 virtual functions on this card, and they should be seen as 8 separate PCIe devices by the kernel.

As it fails, it indicates that either the card does something wrong or some element, eg. a PCIe bridge, on the motherboard is not initialized properly, most probably because BIOS handles something wrong - it is quite common on non-server motherboards.

Anyway - I have contacted the driver maintainer and they are trying to find out what is wrong.
If/when I have an answer I'll post it here, maybe it will help somebody else.

Yes, you did post all of those things, then posted the rest of the relevant information in your follow up.
You can simply post the relevant pieces of those files (in CODE tags). We don't need to see the entire files, just the pieces that are relevant.
Did you read/follow either of the guides you were given?

Yes I have, I spent 12 hours last day trying to find out what's wrong, before posting here.
When I get more info from the NIC manufacturer (they asked for some debug info) I'll post it back here.

We have no idea what you've done unless you tell us; I provided two links that address that issue; did you go through those (specifically, the Red Hat one?) Because again, you have to load the module with things enabled:
...and then write to the file. Again, as business_kid mentions, the command you posted will *NOT* do anything for you, since it's only going to write into a file in whatever directory you're in at the time. From the documentation, they specifically say:
...to actually write to the correct file. Have you done those things???
Great.

Hi everybody,

FYI, yes I was writing to the right file.
The problem is solved.
It was caused because not everything in BIOS was configured correctly:
I had IOMMU and SR-IOV enabled.
The ACS and ARI options were in a weird place in BIOS and I didn't find them earlier.
They were set to [Auto], when I set both of them to [Enabled] it worked.