Enabling VLAN Passthrough on Intel X710-series NICs

Introduction¶

Some servers have Intel X710-series network interface cards (NICs), such as the author's Minisforum MS-01, which is used for a virtualized firewall. Unfortunately, the stock Rocky Linux driver has a bug where VLANs are not passed through the bridge interfaces as expected. This happened to the author's MikroTik CHR virtual machine. Fortunately, it is fixable.

Prerequisites and assumptions¶

The following are the minimum requirements for using this procedure:

A Rocky Linux 8 or 9 server with an Intel X710-series NIC

Installing the Intel-provided NIC drivers¶

While the stock Rocky Linux driver does not pass through VLANs, the Intel-provided driver does. First, navigate to Intel's driver download page.

Intel's X710 Driver Download Page

When you are on the above page, download the i40e_RPM_Files.zip file and subsequently, unzip it:

unzip i40e_RPM_Files.zip

You will see a bunch of RPM files:

kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel8u10.src.rpm
kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel8u10.x86_64.rpm
kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel8u7.src.rpm
kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel8u7.x86_64.rpm
kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel8u8.src.rpm
kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel8u8.x86_64.rpm
kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel8u9.src.rpm
kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel8u9.x86_64.rpm
kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel9u1.src.rpm
kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel9u1.x86_64.rpm
kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel9u2.src.rpm
kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel9u2.x86_64.rpm
kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel9u3.src.rpm
kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel9u3.x86_64.rpm
kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel9u4.src.rpm
kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel9u4.x86_64.rpm

The file to install is in the kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhelXuY.x86_64.rpm format, where X and Y are the Rocky Linux major and minor versions respectively. For instance, on the author's Rocky Linux 9.4 server X is 9, Y is 4, so the author's install package was:

sudo dnf install kmod-i40e-2.25.11-1.rhel9u4.x86_64.rpm

After installing the driver, you will need to reboot the server:

sudo reboot

After rebooting, the X710 NICs should pass through VLANs via bridge interfaces.

Author: Neel Chauhan

Contributors: Ganna Zhyrnova