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Add 10 GbE to your system with an M.2 2280 module

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Re: Add 10 GbE to your system with an M.2 2280 module

#5
I have had a lot of trouble with the Marvell AQtion controllers under Linux. They are supposed to work and are plug and play on modern kernels, but I was never able to resolve a bug where the controller stopped working after a few hours. The only resolution I found was rebooting, which made the controller not very useful.

The Intel 10GbE controllers are more expensive, but much better in my experience.

For anyone looking for an alternative, I use an M.2 to PCI-e slot riser and a regular HHHL PCI-e card. Example product: https://www.amazon.com/ADT-Link-Extension-Support-Channel-Mi...

Re: Add 10 GbE to your system with an M.2 2280 module

#7
post #2

well, a M.2 2280 slot (presumably one that's NVME capable, not SATA only for storage) is just a PCI-E slot in a weird small shape.

Yes, but embedded devices and laptops generally don’t have pci-e.

Lots of consumer motherboards don't have a lot of PCIe slots wider than x1 (which is not enough for 10GigE), but they often have multiple NVMe capable M.2 slots, that this card would work with.

In my home server for instance, which is built on a consumer μATX board, the wider PCIe slots are filled with a GPU and HBA, which leaves no way to add 10GigE without spending a lot of money on a new motherboard and CPU - or finding a way to use the M.2 slot.

Re: Add 10 GbE to your system with an M.2 2280 module

#9
It's interesting to see just how slow faster ethernet standards have been. Feels like I've had gigabit ethernet at a pretty low cost for nearly 20 years now, but faster than that has been pretty esoteric outside of the datacentre.

I guess there really isn't much demand for faster than gigabit speeds even now (outside of servers?)

Re: Add 10 GbE to your system with an M.2 2280 module

#10

If added to the RPi4x wouldn’t 10GBe saturate the RPi4 CPU?

I think the RPi4 doesn't have enough PCIe lanes for 10 gigabit.

Looks like the compute module 4 has one lane of pci-e 2.0, which gets you to 5gbps (theoretically). So yeah, you'll definitely run out of PCI-e bandwidth.
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