Enable SR-IOV on Intel I350

I bought this card on eBay and it turns out different manufacturer’s disable the SR-IOV feature. The following procedure will enabled it.

Warning

Do this at your own risk! No guarantee it wont brick your NIC.

  1. Find your ethernet controllers

    sudo lshw -c network -businfo
    ../_images/lspci-ethernet.png

  2. Check your controllers capabilities

    sudo lspci -vs 0000:03:00.0
    ../_images/eth-capabilities.png

    Attention

    In this example SR-IOV is enabled. No need to make any changes.

  3. Check the offset bit

    sudo ethtool --eeprom-dump enp3s0f0 offset 0x004a length 1

    Note

    If SR-IOV is enabled this should be set to something other than zero my card was set to “F0” (Disabled).

  4. Modify the offset bit based on the number supported VF’s. The i350 supports up to 8. I set mine to 7 based another card that was configured with 7.

    sudo ethtool --change-eeprom enp3s0f0 magic 0x15218086 offset 0x4a length 1 value 0xF7

    Warning

    If done wrong this could brick your interface.

  5. Reboot and check total allowable VF’s. Should now show 7 for each interface.

    cat /sys/class/net/enp3s0f0/device/sriov_totalvfs
cat /sys/class/net/enp3s0f1/device/sriov_totalvfs