QLogic ISP4032 - no traffic in VMs.

TodorPetkov

Well-Known Member
Mar 21, 2020
61
9
48
Hello,

I am running PVE 9 on Dell R630. It has dual port QLogic card. lspci shows the following:

5f:01.0 Ethernet controller: QLogic Corp. ISP4032-based Ethernet IPv6 NIC
5f:01.1 Network controller: QLogic Corp. ISP4032-based iSCSI TOE IPv6 HBA
5f:01.2 Ethernet controller: QLogic Corp. ISP4032-based Ethernet IPv6 NIC
5f:01.3 Network controller: QLogic Corp. ISP4032-based iSCSI TOE IPv6 HBA


nic0 is bridged as vmbr0 and the IP address of the host is on this bridge. Network is fine, I can update/ping/etc. However, when I create VM/container on this bridge, it received an IP address from the gateway via DHCP, but no other traffic. I can't ping the gateway, arping from another host in the same network sees only one packet and then stalls. I tried the bridge as Linux and OVS, but it still not working when bridged and passed in VM/container. Searching the web for answers does not bring anything. Anyone else ran into such issue?

"ethtool -i nic0" shows that the driver is qla3xxx, kernel is
Linux XXX 6.17.13-2-pve #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC PMX 6.17.13-2 (2026-03-13T08:06Z) x86_64 GNU/Linux

Thanks in advance.
 
Last edited:
Hi,

This might be hardware checksum offloading on the qla3xxx NIC breaking bridged VM/container traffic. The qla3xxx driver offloads TX checksum calculation to the NIC hardware. This works fine for the host's own traffic, but when packets from VMs/containers are bridged through to the physical NIC, they pass through a virtual tap device first. When packets travel through the bridge and to the tap device, there is no actual hardware NIC to handle checksumming, so the checksum remains incorrect and packets are dropped from the VM side as invalid. Please run:

Code:
ethtool -K nic0 tx off rx off gso off tso off gro off sg off rxvlan off txvlan off

This command is not persistent - it turns off all the offloading on this nic right away. When you confirm this is the issue you can make it persistent in /etc/networks/interfaces

Code:
iface nic0 inet manual
    post-up ethtool -K nic0 tx off rx off gso off tso off gro off sg off rxvlan off txvlan off