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booop
Contributor
Contributor

Broadcom 57781 support in the tg3 driver?

Hi,

I'm trying to get a box up and running that has a Broadcom NetXtreme BCM57781 Gigabit card in it.

ESXi 5 install with no problems and boots - but no networking. Trying to dhcp I can see the switch port activity but no result and setting a static ip doesn't help either.

The console lists the card as found and bound as vmnic0 in addition :

- lspci shows the card

- esxcfg-module -q | grep tg3 reports it loaded

- running grep on the tg3 module in /usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod returns a hit on the string 57781

- esxcfg-nics -l returns the card as bound to vmnic0 and shows it's status as up with the correctly negotiated link speed.

Any ideas? Is this card *actually* supported? I know the HCL says no (as above) but for all intents and purposes vmware seems very happy with it - except for the minor issues of actually shoving traffic through it Smiley Happy

Is this just a case of if it's no on the HCL you're on your own or is there actually some level of support as implied by the kernel module looking ok - in which case I have an issue elsewhere.

Thanks for any help - anyone running 5 (or 4 which I havn't tried yet) on this chip?

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4 Replies
Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

Welcome to the VMware Communities forums.

The drivers with ESXi will support the official list, but typically work fine with compatible, "unsuported" NICs.

What sort of hardware do you have this is?

Dave
VMware Communities User Moderator

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booop
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

Thanks for the welcome!

It's the onboard NIC on an Asrock z68 extreme 4 motherboard.

NIC is listed on the Asrock site, and identified by vmware as a Broadcom BCM57781 chip.

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

When you look at the output for lspci, is the NIC sharing a bus with other devices?  Have you updated the BIOS for the host?

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booop
Contributor
Contributor

lspci shows no other devices sharing the bus - and the BIOS is on the latest release.

It sounds like I'll just have to get another card to drop in!

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