OPNsense on a budget C3758R appliance: four ix interfaces, SFP+ ports show down with an RJ45 module
On an inexpensive firewall appliance (Intel Atom C3758R, six 1GbE igc ports and two SFP+ cages wired to the CPU) OPNsense showed four ix interfaces instead of two and the SFP+ ports stayed red/down with a copper SFP+ RJ45 module, although the link LEDs lit. ifconfig -v identified ix0/ix1 as the SFP+ ports; the listing reealed the board actually has four SFP+ lanes with only two cages populated.
- Hardware: Intel C3758R appliance, Intel X553
- Transceivers: SFP+ to RJ45 copper moudle, FS.com SFP+ optics
- Form factor: SFP+
Symptoms / messages:
ix ports shown down
four ix interfaces for two cages
Comments 2
Ports only show UP when assigned and cabled; the extra ix devices are unpopulated lanes. Prefer fibre or DAC over copper SFP+ and use FS.com Intel-coded modules.
Add the boot-time tunable hw.ix.unsupported_sfp=1 for non-Intel-coded modules; after a reboot and assigning the interfaces in OPNsense the ports worked, though the poster later saw instability with the copper SFP+ ports.