Intel Foxville 2.5Gb NIC flaw advisory circulated

Intel sent an advisory about its ‘Foxville’ ethernet controllers having a packet loss issue. The launch of Comet Lake processors and new LGA 1200 socket motherboards coming very soon. Therefore, there’s little-to-no space to put a new feature or fix a flaw. These 2.5 Gb NICs will be used commonly with the Z490 chipset.

2.5G NIC’s packet-loss issue

According to the leaked slides, this includes the already launched I225-V and the upcoming I225-LM 2.5G controllers. Intel reports that there is an ‘Inte-Packer Gap’ (IGP) variance in its IEEE standard. Because of this, the packet loss is expected between 1-10Mb/s speeds. This flaw is apparent when used with certain 2.5 Gb routers and switches. The slide does not list all the troublesome models.

Intel Foxville IPG Advisor

But it includes a handful of networking hardware manufacturers. Netgear, Juniper and AQuantia reportedly have this problem but Huawei, Cisco, Buffalo and Aruba 2.5Gb networking devices are not yet found to have problems. Luckily there is no security flaw, neither it leads to network disconnection. Testing is still in process so the list of affected models would be more extensive now.

Many Intel motherboards and notebooks use I225-V NIC controller. Some manufacturers have been pushing 2.5 Gb NICs on certain variants. Some AMD motherboards also provide 2.5 NIC controllers. These chipsets will mark the use of 2.5 G NICs as a standard. There’s no news of the same used in Intel B460 chipsets.

Confirmation for Rocket Lake-S aligned with fixed 2.5 Gb NIC

It is uncertain if Intel would be considering using third party NIC controllers, or found a way to get around its problem. but Intel set the expectation of solving this problem by second-half of 2020. In its process, Intel put a ‘leaked paper official confirmation’ of the Rocket Lake-S CPU. The new Foxville NIC stepping with the fix is aligned with the production of Rocket Lake-S CPUs, the Comet Lake-S, successor.

Nothing is known about the Intel Rocket Lake-S CPUs, except that it will move away from It would be safe to assume that Intel Rocket Lake-S will support PCIe 4.0, possibly on the Intel Z490 and maybe even the B460 mid-range performance chipset.

Source: XFastest

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