High Sierra native support for 10Gb ethernet

[pastrychef]

Hey Pastry did you ever get 10gig networking on your hackintosh?
[you probably dont remember me but your high sierra 8700k guide was the basis for choosing all the parts for my build and its been working really well for 1.5 years now so thanks again]

My hackintosh is my main workstation for running ableton & I use an upgraded mac pro 1,1 as a local fileshare server.
since the mac pro has 2x gigabit, I figured I should upgrade the hackintosh to 10gig first but also wanted to ask:

- do you have a 10gig pcie card that you would recommend for a 1,1 mac pro as well?

- if both ends + the router/switch are upgraded to 10gig, would that be fast enough to edit footage or load massive 6GB sampler patches over the network? [any youtube videos to suggest in that department?]

Yes, I've been using 10GBase-T for quite a while now. I'm currently using a Syba AQC107 based card and it works OOB with built-in macOS drivers.

On the MacPro1,1 side, I don't know... I've seen some reports on MacRumors.com from old Mac Pro users who have had problems getting full 10Gb speeds. I don't know if it's a limitation of PCI-e 2.0 or a lanes issue. Recently, one guy went through the Syba card and then switched to Sonnet card and got even worse results. In the end, I don't think he ever got it resolved...

Personally, I have a DIY NAS with an Intel X540-T2 card in it that has been working great.

Assuming, you can get 10GBase-T working on both ends, I don't know if it would be sufficient for your needs. On my particular setup I see approx 800+MB/s sequential reads and 300MB/s sequential writes on an 8 drive array with dual disk redundancy. My write speeds are severely limited by my use of extremely cheap and notoriously slow drives.

Performance can be greatly improved if I added an SSD or two for cache. I'm certain that would fully saturate the 10Gb connection.

 

[freaksavior]

I'm running two of these on Z87/H87 builds but can't get more than about 2Gb through them. Has anybody done iperf tests to confirm througput on some of these 10Gb nics?

These DO NOT show up on 13.0 as expected, and using the combo updater to get to 13.3, it did find the cards but no firmware was flashed. They show up as aqc-107(non s).

edit: Sorry for the dumb question, but is the SMBIOS of the iMac Pro required to get these to flash during 13.3 or if it's supported OOB, is there anything I should be tweaking?

Thanks!

 

[pastrychef]

I'm running two of these on Z87/H87 builds but can't get more than about 2Gb through them. Has anybody done iperf tests to confirm througput on some of these 10Gb nics?

These DO NOT show up on 13.0 as expected, and using the combo updater to get to 13.3, it did find the cards but no firmware was flashed. They show up as aqn-107.

edit: Sorry for the dumb question, but is the SMB of the iMac Pro required to get these to flash during 13.3 or if it's supported OOB, is there anything I should be tweaking?

View attachment 414225

Thanks!

I never tried an AQN-107... I've only ever tried AQC-107.

While the AQC-107 can be made to work with High Sierra 10.13.3 or higher, real OOB experience came with Mojave.

I never really had to do any tweaking in either High Sierra or Mojave. Once it started to work, it just worked.

You may want to mess with jumbo frames and/or try AFP instead of SMB...

 

[freaksavior]

Hrm, thanks for the reply. I am running Mojave on both builds right now; I only installed 10.13 as a test to try and check if these would get flashed with a different firmware when upgrading to 10.13.3.

>You may want to mess with jumbo frames and/or try AFP instead of SMB...

I have it set for 9k on the switch and 9k on both machines.

If you're referring to transfer protocols, I'm actually only doing iperf3 tests to check their throughput. No re-world tests with file transfers yet. I know the NICs work, I tested this out in Ubuntu and was able to get a consistent 11Gb speed.

 

[pastrychef]

Hrm, thanks for the reply. I am running Mojave on both builds right now; I only installed 10.13 as a test to try and check if these would get flashed with a different firmware when upgrading to 10.13.3.

>You may want to mess with jumbo frames and/or try AFP instead of SMB...

I have it set for 9k on the switch and 9k on both machines.

If you're referring to transfer protocols, I'm actually only doing iperf3 tests to check their throughput. No re-world tests with file transfers yet. I know the NICs work, I tested this out in Ubuntu and was able to get a consistent 11Gb speed.

I can't speak for the AQN-107, but AQC-107 cards that are working OOB are better off without the macOS 10.13.3 flash. AQC-107 cards that have been flashed by 10.13.3 have difficulty working in Windows because the Windows drivers don't recognize the card.

 

[freaksavior]

Ah gotcha! I'll see if I can find an AQN-107 locally and give that a try. Thanks @pastrychef.

 

[sanke1]

There is not much difference between AQC-107 and AQN-107. C stands for chipset where some OEM has bought off those chips and designed their own cards. Like Asus designed their own XG-C100C and failed hard as they forgot didn't include Wake on LAN circuitry in it. AQN-107 (N stands for NIC) is a complete LAN card designed by Aquantia themselves and you can get directly from Aquantia website. Most likely from their wholesellers like Arrow, etc. It is amply clear that above two are utterly useless for OOTB macOS experience without any kext patches or firmware flashing. You need AQC-107S/AQC-108S chipset based cards to be usable in macOS. Yes the same exact chipset Apple uses in their iMac Pro and Mac Minis.

 

[pastrychef]

There is not much difference between AQC-107 and AQN-107. C stands for chipset where some OEM has bought off those chips and designed their own cards. Like Asus designed their own XG-C100C and failed hard as they forgot didn't include Wake on LAN circuitry in it. AQN-107 (N stands for NIC) is a complete LAN card designed by Aquantia themselves and you can get directly from Aquantia website. Most likely from their wholesellers like Arrow, etc. It is amply clear that above two are utterly useless for OOTB macOS experience without any kext patches or firmware flashing. You need AQC-107S/AQC-108S chipset based cards to be usable in macOS. Yes the same exact chipset Apple uses in their iMac Pro and Mac Minis.

My AQC-107 (non-S) card works OOB.

Source: http://www.sybausa.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=985

There has also been reports that the newer revisions of the Asus XG-C100C work OOB.

 

[freaksavior]

I think I got myself confused with the AQC/N. The link I posted shows AQN but the cards I have are being reported as AQC, which @pastrychef, you're saying work oob.

I loaded 10.13.3 again last night, and this is what I see during boot.

I did flash these with the latest firmware listed on the site. Could this be why it's not wanting to grab the Apple FW?

edit: Since these do appear to be the same chips as the Asus card, and the Asus card did get flashed, is there a way you can dump that FW and I write it using the post from a few pages back?

 

[pastrychef]

I don't have an Asus card. I have a Syba card that works OOB and never required any flashing. I updated the card to the latest firmware as per post #424 of this thread but it was working before updating firmware.

Maybe your card needs the KextsToPatch to work...
Name: AppleEthernetAquantiaAqtion
Find: 6275696C 742D696E
Replace: AABBCCDD AABBCCDD
Comment: AQC 107 10 GbE v2 by Mieze