Let's sneak one more blog post in before the new year! Last week, the ESXi on ARM version 2.1 released, which reintroduced the USB NIC driver, as well as some other fixes. One item on the change log caught my attention:
- Fix ntg3 driver support (experimental)
This fix might address the purple screen issue I documented in my previous blog post. This coincides with the 0.12 release of the edk2-rk3588 firmware, so we'll load that as well. The updated BOM is as follows:
Orange Pi 5 Plus
- ADT-LINK Riser PCIe X4 3.0 PCI-E 4X to M.2 NGFF NVMe M Key 2280 Riser Card
- A USB to SATA adapter to power the riser card
- Another USB to SATA adapter to use a 2.5" SSD as a datastore/boot disk
- Dell Broadcom 5719
- UEFI version 0.12 from the edk2-rk3588 project
- Any size SD card to load the edk2 firmware
- 32GB USB thumb drive to boot ESXi (optional)
- A single USB NIC supported by the fling - I've had great success with ASIX AX88179 based adapters
With that out of the way, we can get to work on installing ESXi. For the initial install, I'm going to use one of the USB network adapters for the management traffic, as the BCM5719 isn't going to work right off the bat. Part of this is because of Rockchip erratum 3588001. While this adapter will work in other computers and operating systems, for some reason, the driver does not automatically switch to legacy interrupts if MSI isn't working. In my previous blog post, I found that disabling MSI at the driver level led to a purple screen, which then led to a conversation with Cyprien Laplace about the driver itself. The fixed driver appears to have resolved this issue, as I can now boot into ESXi and even use the 5719 network ports:
To disable MSI and use legacy interrupts at the driver level, I ran the following command then rebooted the host:
esxcli system module parameters set -m ntg3 -p intrMode=0
On reboot, the network adapters now show up in ESXi, and are usable, at least for management traffic. I haven't stress tested the adapter, but it's encouraging to see the flexibility that ESXi on ARM 2.1 offers for experimental edge use cases. The progress of both the ESXi-ARM and edk2-rk3588 projects has been tremendous, and I'm looking forward to pushing some virtual machines onto this system once more :)
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