We've had two orders of new servers (two servers which will be racked as cloudvirt102[34] and one server which will become backup2001) which use a 10G NIC which isn't supported by the 4.9 kernels we use in stretch and jessie. This task will coordinate possible support options.
There's also an ongoing inquiry to our sales representatives at Dell to check which alternative NIC options we have in the 10G space (and to evaluate whether these are properly supported by 4.9).
Possible options
- Backport the support for the NIC which went into the qede in 4.12 driver to 4.9 (either internally or possibly via contracting externally). Support was added in
- Provide an internally maintained 4.14.x kernel (based on the current kernel.org LTS kernel (causes significant ongoing internal maintenance)
- Switch to other NICs until the affected servers are running a kernel which provides support for that model
(Note that in addition to the missing support in Linux 4.9 there's also the additional issue of missing support in d-i's kernel, but the kernel needs to be sorted out first)