Intel 82599 based NICs on Dell 12G Servers w/ FreeBSD?

Dell offers the X520-DA2 10G Fiber NIC based on the Intel 82599 chipset for it’s 12G line of servers. It seems that there were two batches of this NIC manufactured. One batch was Dell branded, the other Intel branded.

According to this post, the FreeBSD source appears to be missing PCI ID’s etc that would enable the Dell branded card to work under FreeBSD on it’s 12G servers resulting in the card not being recognized by the OS. Inspection of dmesg shows that there is an ethernet card with no driver attached.

This is currently being corrected in HEAD, but for the time being swapping in an Intel branded equivalent which is seen by FreeBSD without a problem is sufficient. Unfortunately, the Dell BIOS does not recognize the card. having said that, the card is recognized in the OS and does work using the ixgbe(4) driver. The interface name begins with “ix”.