I had instability with my onboard AQC113CS on ASUS ProArt X870E-Creator WiFi when running it on 10G.
I could consistently crash the connection by running iperf3 for less than 3 minutes.
First I tried all the suggestions from Reddit about turning of EEE, Flow Control, IPv6 and so on, but that didn't work.
Then I tried 5 different cables and even ordered a brand new CAT8 cable from Amazon, but that also didn't work.
In my research I ended up here, and saw that some users had successfully flashed their ProArt X670 and Z790, so I wanted to try it for myself.
At first I couldn't get the firmware update tool to run on my Windows install (I later found it was due to secure boot) so I downloaded the Ubuntu version firmware updater tool from Dell:
www.dell.com/support/home/en-ae/drivers/...tails?driverid=m9261
After extracting the tools, which was packaged quite messy, i ran
./flashUpdate2 ATL2-8.0.1_agent_SIGN.clx AQC113-Antigua_Bx-1.3.33_bdp_aqsign.clx
Before the update, ethtool -i enp13s0 showed
driver: atlantic
version: 6.14.7-gentoo
firmware-version: 1.3.24
After the update it showed
driver: atlantic
version: 6.14.7-gentoo
firmware-version: 1.3.33
After rebooting I had no network.
The link was "up", but I couldn't send or receive packets. Not DHCP, ARP, ICMP or anything. Lights are on in my switch and my NIC.
After this failure I re-read the thread and figured out that I needed to disable secure boot and run the firmware update from a Hiren's BootCD PE environment to make it work.
I tried to install every single firmware and power off the system for 30 seconds after each attempt and none of them worked.
All the versions up to 1.5.38 have the same exact behaviour:
- The lights are on in the network interface
- The operating system recognizes the NIC and thinks it's active; enp13s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP group default qlen 1000
- The switch recognizes a link
- No packets can be sent or received. tcpdump only shows "unanswered" ARP traffic from the interface
During Linux boot on firmware 1.5.39 and up, I get a error message "atlantic: Boot code hanged"
There is not a network interface that, nothing I can poke at, it fails to load completely.
From 1.5.39 and up the name also changes in lspci
before 1.5.39 (including original firmware): Aquantia Corp. AQtion AQC113CS NBase-T/IEEE 802.3an Ethernet Controller [Antigua 10G] (rev 03)
after 1.5.39: Aquantia Corp. Antigua NBase-T/IEEE 802.3an Ethernet Controller - Engineering Sample (rev 03)
So I've basically bricked my interface. I didn't know how to take a backup of the original firmware and now I can't get any of the available firmware online to send as much a ping to my router.
I don't know what to do from here.
Luckily the motherboard has an onboard 2.5G Intel NIC right next to the dead 10G AQC113CS that I can use.
It all just sucks because I specifically chose this motherboard for its onboard 10G!
Marvell/Aquantia AQC113CS (10Gbps) Firmware Version 1.5.42
