Aquantia NIC problems #51
Description
I have a pair of Aquantia AQC113-based NICs with firmware 1.3.35 and running in Ubuntu 24.04.3. When I used the Zabbly 6.17 kernel, and after updating to the 6.18 kernel, the NICs were in a very bad state - one went to NO-CARRIER and the other was UP but unresponsive. The switch showed the port was up.
After (a lot of) troubleshooting including a weird state where UDP was only working for packets under a certain size, I reverted to HWE kernel 6.14 and had to do a full unplug / cold boot to clear the firmware to get a working system again.
I did some online research but the kernels are very new so there aren't many reports. I did see someone with Arch having the same issue with 6.17 and the expectation was it would be fixed in 6.18, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I obviously don't expect you to solve kernel driver problems but wanted to make you aware of this issue. Aquantia cards are widely used in recent Chinese brand NASes (mine's UGreen) and some motherboards so folks should approach these kernels with caution.