We are attempting to use XL710 together with Openstack, and acceleration using SR-IOV.
With the base drivers provided by Ubuntu 14, VM's can be created but during boot cloud-init fails to create any interfaces with the following error message:
[ 7.562357] cloud-init[395]: ret = functor(name, args)
[ 7.563806] cloud-init[395]: File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/cloudinit/cmd/main.py", line 364, in main_init
[ 7.568756] cloud-init[395]: init.apply_network_config(bring_up=bool(mode != sources.DSMODE_LOCAL))
[ 7.626863] cloud-init[395]: File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/cloudinit/stages.py", line 635, in apply_network_config
[ 7.627928] cloud-init[395]: netcfg, src = self._find_networking_config()
[ 7.628708] cloud-init[395]: File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/cloudinit/stages.py", line 622, in _find_networking_config
[ 7.632059] cloud-init[395]: if self.datasource and hasattr(self.datasource, 'network_config'):
[ 7.636062] cloud-init[395]: File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/cloudinit/sources/DataSourceConfigDrive.py", line 150, in network_config
[ 7.644072] cloud-init[395]: self.network_json, known_macs=self.known_macs)
[ 7.705553] cloud-init[395]: File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/cloudinit/sources/helpers/openstack.py", line 652, in convert_net_json
[ 7.706582] cloud-init[395]: raise ValueError("Unable to find a system nic for %s" % d)
[ 7.707395] cloud-init[395]: ValueError: Unable to find a system nic for {'mtu': 1500, 'type': 'physical', 'mac_address': 'fa:16:3e:c8:81:d9', 'subnets': [{'routes': [], 'type': 'static', 'address': '10.0.20.6', 'netmask': '255.255.255.0', 'ipv4': True}]}
When installing the latest drivers available from Intel, VM's can not be created at all. Looking at the OpenStack logs, this error message can be found: "internal error: couldn't find IFLA_VF_INFO for VF 7 in netlink response". Searching for this error on google it seems like there could be problems when creating more than 30 VF's in some older versions of libvirt, but we are only testing with 8 VF's right now.
We are running Ubuntu 14 and Openstack Mitaka. We have tried a later Ubuntu/Openstack version (Ubuntu 16 and OpenStack Newton) but there were problems there too -- unsure if it was the same issue, since the logs are long gone.
We have the latest drivers and firmware updates installed. We do -not- have the i40evf driver installed since that would conflict with the VM claiming VF's according to this document https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/technology-briefs/xl710-sr-iov-config-guide-gbe-linux-brief.pdf .
When configuring SR-IOV we are following the guide on https://docs.openstack.org/mitaka/networking-guide/config-sriov.html
We have some other Intel cards (I can't remember the model) which this works fine for.