Traffic between cxgbe VFs and/or PF on a host

From: John Nielsen <lists_at_jnielsen.net>
Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2024 04:33:06 UTC
Hi-

I’m running a FreeBSD 14-STABLE host with a Chelstio T520. I have a bhyve VM (also running 14-STABLE) to which I have assigned a VF of the NIC. That is all working as expected; the host can pass traffic using the PF cxl0 and the guest can pass traffic using the VF cxlv0. However the host cannot communicate with the guest. I am looking in to the possibility of enabling 802.1qbg / VEPA / reflective relay on the switch port but I’d like to know if the T5 can do that switching itself without sending the packets over the wire. The marketing material says the card "integrates a high performance packet switch” but I don’t know how to configure that functionality on FreeBSD or if this use case is supported. Can anyone shed some light on that?

The other alternative would be to wire up the second port but if I can get away with not needing to use another SFP+ port on the switch for this that would be ideal.

Thanks!

JN