HPE Ethernet 10Gb 2-port 562SFP+ firmware vs. Intel firmware

[dchard]

I have two of this HPE Ethernet 10Gb 2-port 562SFP+ adapter type. One of the reason I chossed this card is the Intel X710 chipset its based around.

In 2018. April Intel added an important new feature called DDP via firmware upgrade for this chipset. However there is zero information on the HPE product page if the HPE released firmware for this card already has this or not, and in general there is no information about a given HPE firmware release is equals to which Intel firmware release. And of coarse HPE uses its own firmware numbering so at this point it is not possible to figure this out.

I already opened a ticket about this towards HPE support, but I wanted to ask here as well, as I did not received an answer as of yet.

I would recommend to either use the Intel based firmware numbering, or at least inform your customers that a given HPE firmware release equals to which Intel firmware release and the level of feature set supported. As this is chaos at the moment.

[Bunsol]

Hi Dchard,

Good Day.  Information requested by you will need to be checked with the backend team at HPE. We would suggest you to continue pursue the support ticket so that it will be notified to the concerned team to get the desired information.

Regards,

Bunsol

[dchard]

Hi Bunsol,

Today I received some news from support:

I got the info, that for the past it is still unclear what is the correlation between the Intel and HPE releases. But there is an upcoming HPE firmware 10.4.3 (soon to be released), that will be equal to Intel 6.80 firmware (which is the latest Intel release at the momentm with DDP support).

MOD: the expected release will be around March. 

This is a clear indication that with these "smart" NICs, the support informations, and timely updates are of the essence. If these informations are not available, customers will just buy NICs directly from Intel (instead of HPE), because at least they know what they get.

I - for one - serisouly considering not to buy adapters from HPE due to this, but buy them directly from Intel.

[dchard]

If someone is following:

The promised firmware upgrade is released finally. Be careful, as HPE is - once again - using completely different firmware version numbering: for example the linux firmware upgrade is called 1.17.17(B) (2 Apr 2019), and this is the update contains the 10.4.3 firmware version which is referred by the HPE customer support to contain the same features as the Intel 6.80 firmware.

So for example if you check the NIC FW version in ethtool, you will need to see 10.4.3 after this upgrade, which should be equal to Intel's 6.80 FW version.

Of course, in the changelog/release notes/enhancements area, again there is zero information about DDP or anything else, from which the customer can figure it out what the firmware actually contains.

 For our new servers, we bought the NICs (with same chipset) directly from Intel, so thank you HPE, but we are never coming back. 

[MJMVSAN]

I have also come across this issue, whereby there doesnt seem to be any correlation between the naming from Intel and HPE on the Firmware Versions. 

Scenario i have is:

• DL380 Gen10 Hosts
• ESXi 6.7 u1 installed
• 2 x dual port X710 / 562SFP+ Adapters fitted in each host

I see the latest firmware/driver combination for these hosts and this OS is as below, captured from the VMware HCL IO Devices compatability list.

• Driver: i40en version 1.8.6
• Firmware: 7.00

So i am able to download this of course however the problem then comes when you try to find out what the host is running in terms of Firmware of the adapters. I have the Driver details as thats easy to find on esxcli however for the firmware of the adpaters when i run esxcli network nic get -n vmnic8 all i see is the below:

• Firmware Version: 10.4.3
  Driver Version: 1.7.11

So this confirms the driver installed is 1.7.11 so that aligns to VMware HCL, however the firmware listed is 10.4.3. When i then also look in iLO of the host this Firmware is also listed as 10.4.3. On the VMware HCL this is not listed, what is listed is firmware versions 6.80, 7.00, etc https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/detail.php?deviceCategory=io&productid=37976&deviceCategory=io&details=1&keyword=x710&page=1&display_interval=500&sortColumn=Partner&sortOrder=Asc 

So how do you know which version of firmware you have installed? there should be a mapping table like 6.80 = 10.4.3

[MJMVSAN]

So with esxcli that command details that 10.4.3 is the Firmware Version, however if you look on the HPE Site for the Adapter this details that 10.4.3 is the "Single NVM Version": 

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?swItemId=MTX_c2e9b0389535421895765c4ed0#tab4

However again on the above link there is no detail of the 7.00 Firmware that is listed on the VMware HCL for this adapter

[upAndup448768]

It looks like the i40en 1.8.6 driver is super recent. VMware's driver download page shows a release date of May 15th.

Although VMware's HCL entry lists firmware version 7.0 as required by the 1.8.6 driver, Intel's "Compatibility Information" page states that the 1.8.6 driver also supports firmware 6.80 and 6.01:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005893/network-and-i-o/ethernet-products.html?wapkw=x710+firmware

I see in a previous post that HPE has confirmed that firmware 10.4.3 for the 562SFP+ is equivilent to firmware 6.80 for the Intel x710.

So you should be ok to use the latest driver if you need to.

Intel's support site for the x710 NIC still shows 6.80 as the latest available firmware.... so I assume it will be a while before HPE releases any new firmware updates for their 562SFP+ NIC.

[dchard]

Now the latest Intel firmware is 7.00 for the x710 series. Lets see how many months it will take for HPE to basically copy and paste exactly the same code and "release" it to us...

[dchard]

The new HPE released firmware is out. Again, there is no information about which features this firmware has compared to the Intel released 7.00 version...

[dchard]

If someone is still interested in this issue, I might have found a solution:

I am not sure if this is coming with the latest i40e driver (v 2.10.19.30), but in the dmesg log you can find something like this:

[ 9.761456] i40e: Intel(R) 40-10 Gigabit Ethernet Connection Network Driver - version 2.10.19.30
[ 9.776772] i40e: Copyright(c) 2013 - 2019 Intel Corporation.
[ 9.804541] i40e 0000:08:00.0: fw 6.71.50696 api 1.7 nvm 10.5.5

Take a close look at the last line: fw 6.71.50696

This is a version number very close to the Intel fw version number, and is never used by HPE in any official documnetation. If you list the driver and firmware version with ethtool for the same card, you will see this:

driver: i40e
version: 2.10.19.30
firmware-version: 10.5.5
expansion-rom-version:
bus-info: 0000:08:00.0
supports-statistics: yes
supports-test: yes
supports-eeprom-access: yes
supports-register-dump: yes
supports-priv-flags: yes

So it seems that the Intel i40e driver is giving the version number away. Not exactly a match to the 6.80 Intel released, but close. On the next upgrade I will take another look how this chnages.