No sniffer flag using ethtool --show-priv-flags

Infrastructure & Networking Adapters And Cables Firmware Tools
#1

I have a Mellanox X-5 NIC. I was trying to use tcpdump to capture the traffic on mlx5_0 port.

But I don’t see the sniffer flag when using “ethtool --show-priv-flag mlx5_0”, so I can’t turn on the sniffer to capture the traffic.

Here is few more info about the system we have

$ ethtool --version

ethtool version 4.8

$ tcpdump --version

tcpdump version 4.9.2

libpcap version 1.5.3

OpenSSL 1.0.2k-fips 26 Jan 2017

$ ethtool --show-priv-flags mlx0

Private flags for mlx0:

rx_cqe_moder : on

tx_cqe_moder : off

rx_cqe_compress : off

tx_cqe_compress : off

rx_striding_rq : on

rx_no_csum_complete: off

xdp_tx_mpwqe : on

dropless_rq : off

per_channel_stats : on

hw_lro : off

tx_xdp_hw_checksum : off

skb_xmit_more : off

$uname

Linux ares 3.10.0-1127.13.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 23 15:46:38 UTC 2020 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

OFED

MLNX_OFED_LINUX-5.1-0.6.6.0-rhel7.8-x86_64

Thanks.

#2

Hi ,

Please note that we removed support for Offloaded Traffic Sniffer feature, but we can suggest using the docker-container solution to use RDMA devices, in order to capture and analyze RDMA packets using tcpdump.

Requirements

  • CentOS/RHEL 7.x / 8.x

  • Upstream Kernel must be higher than 4.9

​- ConnectX-3/4/5

Installation instructions:

  1. Install OS that is compatible with kernel 4.9 and above

  2. Install Upstream kernel starting from version 4.9 support sniffing RDMA(RoCE) traffic

  3. Yum install docker

  4. Docker pull mellanox/tcpdump-rdma

  5. Service docker start

  6. Docker run -it -v /dev/infiniband:/dev/infiniband -v /tmp/traces:/tmp/traces --net=host --privileged mellanox/tcpdump-rdma bash

  7. Install MFT 4.9

  8. Install perftest package from MLNX_OFED RPMS directory

  9. Capture RoCE packets with the following:

tcpdump -i mlx5_0 -s 0 -w /tmp/traces/capture1.pcap

or

tcpdump -i mlx4_0 -s 0 -w /tmp/traces/capture1.pcap​

  1. Run ib_write_bw test , as below:

Server : ib_write_bw -d mlx5_0 -a -F

Client: ib_write_bw -a -F <Server_ip>

  1. Open the pcap through wireshark to verify

Thanks,

Samer

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