I recently came across this Silicom card which offers 4x10GbE RJ45 using PCIE 3.0 x8, which means the card itself should have well abundant bus bandwidth and shouldn’t be bottlenecked by the transfer speed, plus it should still have decent OS support (at least Windows 11 and above should still support it).
I did my DD, and it seems like the card was based on Intel X540 and clearly, I smell something was off, that not only Intel seems to just offer X540-T2 on their official KB, and no information for the 4-ported cousin whatsoever, but also that X540-T2 only runs at PCIE 2.1 and not PCIE 3.0. So, while this card is only about $60 on eBay, I was raising some eyebrows to whether or not, take the bet, as I don’t even know if it has SR-IOV on it (I need it desperately for learning purposes). Despite the X540 controller itself should have had SR-IOV as clearly indicated by Intel, I’m not so sure because the Silicom’s tech page for this PE310G4I40EU-T card, did not specify the presence of SR-IOV (just VMDq which is a far cry to SR-IOV), and so it makes me wonder why, because other cards debuted around the same time of the PE310G4I40EU-T, do clearly indicated having SR-IOV support or not.
Someone suggested this as an OEM part which was customized to cater Lenovo servers, that stitched 2 X540-T2 in one physical card (with separate circuity or PLX switch, I don’t really know tho), so technically speaking I should see 2x X540-T2 and thus theoretically should be able to do two DDA/VFIO assignments, which kinda makes for an interesting SR-IOV…alternative?
And because it was an OEM part, hence why Intel did not document it nor was the information circulating around the internet for this particular card as most OEM parts would just go dark under the cover. If anyone has this card installed, please help me out to confirm whether my information is correct, and so I can clear out the muddies before I buy.