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Connection issues packet loss, network down with Intel I225-V and I226
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Description

Many issues with Intel Ethernet I225-V and I226 from here report:

https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/11nofam/intel_i225v_rev_3_issues/

Method fix:

Intel recently announced that the only way to solve connection issues with I225-V is disabling EEE (Energy-Efficient Ethernet mode)

Details

Version
VyOS 1.4-rolling
Is it a breaking change?
Perfectly compatible
Issue type
Bug (incorrect behavior)

Event Timeline

I have experienced this myself several years ago where "Green Ethernet" aka "Energy-Efficient Ethernet mode" was the cause that HPE Comware switches/routers had issues with cable based Apple devices.

The fix in that case was to disable "auto-power-down" which with VyOS lingo would be something like:

set interface ethernet eth0 auto-power-down off

Note that when it comes to EEE there are basically two different methods (both might need the capability to be able to get disabled):

  1. Introducing micro-sleeps to the PHY when no packets are being sent or received. Similar to HLT operations in x86 CPU's back in the days when NOP was the operation to fill in with when there was nothing to be done. The micro-sleeps means that the average power consumption of the PHY will be lower than it otherwise would have been.
  1. Detecting cable length (TP-cabling) and only output the amount of power needed for the signal to reach the other end of the TP-cable. If we ignore long range interfaces a regular TP-cable is designed to transmit signal without losses to at least 100 meter between active components (rule of thumb is 80 meter for a fixed installation which leaves room for 10 meter patch cables at both ends - note that each connector will weaken the signal so many patches in a run might not result in 100 meter end to end). By detecting cable length to lets say 5 meter of cable being used then far less power needs to be applied compared to if a 100 meter cable is detected.

I would suggest to introduce two new settings for the admin to be able to manipulate this behaviour:

Defaults to off:

set interface ethernet eth0 eee-auto-power-down on

Defaults to off:

set interface ethernet eth0 eee-cable-length-detect on

c-po changed the task status from Open to In progress.Dec 21 2023, 7:29 PM
c-po claimed this task.
c-po triaged this task as Normal priority.
c-po added a project: VyOS 1.5 Circinus.