IntelLucy - Open source driver for the Intel X500 family of 10GBit network adapters on macOS

[MaLd0n]

IntelLucy is an open source driver for the Intel X500 family of 10GBit Ethernet controllers.

Key Features of the Driver

Supports Intel X520, X540, X550 and 82598 Ethernet adapters.

Support for multisegment packets relieving the network stack of unnecessary copy operations when assembling packets for transmission.

No-copy receive and transmit. Only small packets are copied on reception because creating a copy is more efficient than allocating a new buffer.

TCP segmentation offload with IPv4 and IPv6.

Support for TCP/IPv4, UDP/IPv4, TCP/IPv6, UDP/IPv6 and IPv4 checksum offload.

Large Receive Offload: TCP/IPv4 packet streams are identified by the NIC and reassembled to large packets for handover to the network stack eliminating the overhead of packet header processing.

Supports jumbo frames up to 9000 bytes (strongly recommended for 10 GBit/s operation).

Designed to work with High Sierra and above.

Supports Wake on LAN.

Supports hardware VLAN tagging.

Support for Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) is planned for future releases.

Compatible with AppleVTD but also works without.

No need for hardware modifications anymore (used to be required for SmalltreeIntel8259x.kext).

The driver is published under GPLv2.

Current Status

The driver has been successfully tested with Catalina, Monterey, Ventura and Sonoma.

Performance is better than com.apple.DriverKit-AppleEthernetIXGBE.

X520 adapters have been successfully tested with passive DAC cables, 10GBase-SR and 1000Base-T SFP+ modules. SFP+ modules with 10GBase-T ports are unsupported by X520 adapters as they exceed the power limits of the SFP+ slots.

Support for X540 adapters have has been improved and tested in version 1.0.3. Both ports are working simultaneously.

Manual medium slecetion has been fixed for X540 and X550 in version 1.0.4.

VLAN support has been fixed and tested in version 1.0.0.

Wake on LAN has been fixed and confirmed to work in version 1.0.4.

Tested Configurations

X520-DA1 with the following media:

Passive DAC cable: working

10GBase-SR SFP+ modules: working

1000Base-T SFP modules: working

X540-TA1: working

X540-TA2: both ports working

Known Issues

Manual medium selection is working on X540 and X550 since version 1.0.4.

Try to avoid media with flow control enabled as it might cause repeated connection drops due to transmitter hangs and serious performance issues.

For WoL to work you need 4 things:

An adapter which supports WoL (only a few X520 adapters support WoL).

A mainboard which supports WoL from an add-in card.

WoL must be enabled in the UEFI setup.

Proper ACPI tables for MacOS to support wakeup.

LInk HERE

CREDITS: Laura Müller Mieze