MSI-X on Intel® Ethernet Connection Network Adapter Families
Intel® Ethernet Connection 82579/I217/I218/I219 Network Adapter families and Receive Side Scaling (RSS)
The Intel® Ethernet Connection 82579, I217, I218, and I219 Network Adapter Families provide support for Receive Side Scaling (RSS) for up to 2 receive queues. This feature allows incoming network traffic to be processed in multiple queues and provides greater receive efficiency.
Because of the internal architecture of these Intel® Ethernet Network Connection families, they do not support Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI-X).
Message Signaled Interrupts are required to allow separate receive queues to be processed by separate CPU cores.
The Intel® Ethernet Connection 82579, I217, I218, and I219 Network Adapters’ multiple receive queues are thus handled by a single CPU core. This prevents the use of these network connections in SMB-Multichannel configurations.
Other Intel® networking products, including the Intel® I210 Gigabit Network Connection, do support MSI-X and can be used in SMB-Multichannel configurations.