VRRP not working on i40e X722 S2600WFT

[Lennart Sorensen]

I have hit a new problem with the X722 chipset (Intel R1304WFT server).
VRRP simply does not work.

When keepalived registers a vmac interface, and starts transmitting
multicast packets with the vrp message, it never receives those packets
from the peers, so all nodes think they are the master.  tcpdump shows
transmits, but no receives.  If I stop keepalived, which deletes the
vmac interface, then I start to receive the multicast packets from the
other nodes.  Even in promisc mode, tcpdump can't see those packets.

So it seems the hardware is dropping all packets with a source mac that
matches the source mac of the vmac interface, even when the destination
is a multicast address that was subcribed to.  This is clearly not
proper behaviour.

I tried a stock 5.8 kernel to check if a driver update helped, and updated
the nvm firware to the latest 4.10 (which appears to be over a year old),
and nothing changes the behaviour at all.

Seems other people have hit this problem too:
http://mails.dpdk.org/archives/users/2018-May/003128.html

Unless someone has a way to fix this, we will have to change away from
this hardware very quickly.  The IPsec NAT RSS defect we could tolerate
although didn't like, while this is just unworkable.

Quite frustrated by this.  Intel network hardware was always great,
how did the X722 make it out in this state.

-- 
Len Sorensen