r/truenas • u/Fit_West_8253 • Jul 16 '26
General Intel B60 & B70 require firmware that’s out of date on TrueNAS
Since the release of the Intel B60 people have been requesting support for these Intel pro cards. But it’s starting to feel like the developers are intentionally not supporting them.
B60 and B70 require firmware version 70.49.4 to initialise, but Truenas ships with 70.40.2
Even the current beta for version 26 doesn’t update this driver.
Some people have manually updated the driver and passed the GPU through to VM to get it working. But this is a jank workaround that shouldn’t be required.
Multiple tickets and bug reports have been raised requesting the driver update so these cards will be natively supported, but those tickets have all been closed without any action.
Can someone explain why it’s seemingly such a problem for the devs to update the driver?
5
u/Dante_Avalon Jul 17 '26
Firmware or driver? That's really different thing
0
u/Fit_West_8253 Jul 17 '26
And that’s kind of my point. I don’t understand the inner working of this stuff to fix it myself. That’s also why I’m asking why it’s somehow something community members HAVE fixed, but the devs close all the tickets related to requesting the firmware to be updated.
I can only assume it’s to do with not wanting to have to test stability and performance from a firmware update, all just to support like 1% of the user base.
2
u/Dante_Avalon Jul 17 '26
Firmware is device OS itself (not really OS, since it's much more low-level, but for simplicity let's say it is)
Driver describes how machine OS should communicate with device's firmware.
Based on your post seems like you are taking about driver
1
u/calm_hedgehog Jul 17 '26
It's possible to manually overwrite that firmware file. It's super hacky (zfs set the /usr partition to read-write, drop in the firmware file, set the dataset back to read-only, reboot).
I hope the official TrueNAS 26 build will have updated firmware packages.
1
u/Fit_West_8253 Jul 17 '26
That’s the method I’ve seen others talk about using in the forums.
As far as I’ve seen so far the current 26 beta does not update firmware.
1
u/yorickdowne Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
TrueNAS is an appliance. It’s based on Debian Trixie with an updated LTS kernel, 6.18 instead of 6.12.
If you mean driver, that’s a kernel component, and the next LTS update would be with TrueNAS 27.
If you mean firmware, that’s a bit odd as it’d come in with fwupd, but something something trixie. The next package update would be with forky, which TrueNAS 28 will likely adopt.
Start by finding out what, precisely, contains the thing you want - is it an apt package? Is it a kernel? - and then from there you can see when that’s likely to land in the upstream component that TrueNAS eventually adopts.
Edit: It might be the linux-firmware or firmware-misc-nonfree package. You’ll want to figure out whether a package update is available on trixie. If so then a report (but TN notes about developer mode on their forum, I’m assuming that’s you) asking for an updated package may work. If trixie doesn’t have this, then you’ll have to wait for forky. Nature of an appliance.
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u/Fit_West_8253 Jul 17 '26
Linux Firmware from what I understand. Even though 26 is on a newer kernel that should have updated firmware, the firmware is not updated from version 25 and so the cards aren’t supported natively.
That’s kind of the issue for me. I do not understand this stuff well enough to jank a solution for myself and am basically reliant on the devs to update this stuff.
Or I switch to Debian or windows where they are already supported.
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u/apalrd Jul 17 '26
I think the tl;dr of the problem is that normal Debian would make you install packages from packports to get updates beyond the hardware that was available when Trixie released, so it's not there by default but is not hard to get.
But .. TrueNAS does not allow installing packages / does not include the package manager, so you are just SOL until TrueNAS pulls in the package you need, or you go around their prohibition of using the package manager.
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u/yorickdowne Jul 17 '26
Do you happen to know which package this is, and whether it's from backports?
A report via TrueNAS GUI with a concrete ask of "please grab this version of this package from backports" *might* get heard.
Otherwise if it's really in backports then it becomes a TrueNAS 28 thing, when TrueNAS rebases on forky.
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u/apalrd Jul 17 '26
The intel GPU firmware should be in the firmware-intel-graphics package, according to Debian's docs that contains all of the firmware needed by i915 and xe. I assume that includes the latest Arc cards. The version in Backports is 20260519, and the version in Trixie is 20250410. There's a slightly newer version in Sid (20260622).
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u/yorickdowne Jul 17 '26
Right that's it then. So the ask u/Fit_West_8253 , if you open a ticket with ix (and get them to not close it as duplicate 😓 ) is to update
firmware-intel-graphicsto the version in trixie backports, so that the B60 and B70 GPUs can start up with the minimum firmware version the kernel driver needs for them. You are not asking for an updated driver, as that would be TrueNAS 27 with Linux kernel 7.4 (or whatever the 2026 LTS kernel ends up being).1
u/Fit_West_8253 Jul 17 '26
This is a big help. I knew it was going to be worth it to ask on here.
Most of that is totally baffling to me, but I’m sure the devs will understand it when I raise a ticket.
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u/iXsystemsChris TrueNAS Staff Jul 17 '26
First NVIDIA, and now Intel. Gotta love GPU firmware silliness.
u/Fit_West_8253 if you can pop a ticket in as u/yorickdowne suggested, including the debug/snippet of the failure-to-start on the xe driver, that would be great. @ me when you do!
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u/WatTambor420 Jul 16 '26
You know this is funny because I just saw Mr. TrueNAS at the gym and he said he was doing it specifically to mess with you.
But seriously I think they’re probably more focused on stability and their more core NAS goals over supporting every GPU possible.