Fortinet white logo
Fortinet white logo

Administration Guide

PF SR-IOV driver support

PF SR-IOV driver support

Physical Function (PF) SR-IOV drivers for i40e and ixgbe interfaces in virtual environments are supported.

PF provides the ability for PCI Passthrough, but requires an entire Network Interface Card (NIC) for a VM. It can usually achieve greater performance than a Virtual Function (VF) based SR-IOV. PF is also expensive; while VF allows one NIC to be shared among multiple guests VMs, PF is allocated to one port on a VM.

The supported driver versions are:

  • ixgbe: 5.3.7
  • ixgbevf: 4.3.5
  • i40e: 2.4.10
  • i40evfL 3.5.13
Note

All tools and software utilities for UEFI 1.X have been removed from 6.2.0 and later releases. Update to UEFI 2.x to use the UEFI tools or software utilities.

Configuration to use PF or VF is done on the hypervisor, and is not configured on the FortiGate.

To check what driver is being used on the FortiGate:

# diagnose hardware deviceinfo nic port2
Name:        port2
Driver:      i40e
Version:     2.4.10
Bus:         0000:03:00.0
Hwaddr:      3c:fd:fe:1e:98:02
Permanent Hwaddr:3c:fd:fe:1e:98:02
State:       up
Link:        up
Mtu:         1500
Supported:   auto 1000full 10000full
Advertised:  auto 1000full 10000full
Auto:        disabled
Rx packets:      0
Rx bytes:        0
Rx compressed:       0
...

PF SR-IOV driver support

PF SR-IOV driver support

Physical Function (PF) SR-IOV drivers for i40e and ixgbe interfaces in virtual environments are supported.

PF provides the ability for PCI Passthrough, but requires an entire Network Interface Card (NIC) for a VM. It can usually achieve greater performance than a Virtual Function (VF) based SR-IOV. PF is also expensive; while VF allows one NIC to be shared among multiple guests VMs, PF is allocated to one port on a VM.

The supported driver versions are:

  • ixgbe: 5.3.7
  • ixgbevf: 4.3.5
  • i40e: 2.4.10
  • i40evfL 3.5.13
Note

All tools and software utilities for UEFI 1.X have been removed from 6.2.0 and later releases. Update to UEFI 2.x to use the UEFI tools or software utilities.

Configuration to use PF or VF is done on the hypervisor, and is not configured on the FortiGate.

To check what driver is being used on the FortiGate:

# diagnose hardware deviceinfo nic port2
Name:        port2
Driver:      i40e
Version:     2.4.10
Bus:         0000:03:00.0
Hwaddr:      3c:fd:fe:1e:98:02
Permanent Hwaddr:3c:fd:fe:1e:98:02
State:       up
Link:        up
Mtu:         1500
Supported:   auto 1000full 10000full
Advertised:  auto 1000full 10000full
Auto:        disabled
Rx packets:      0
Rx bytes:        0
Rx compressed:       0
...