Upgrade from R81.20 to R82.10 - Auto-Negotiation

[Networks_Team_B]

Hello,

This morning I attempted to upgrade our cluster from R81.20 to R82.10 

Box 2 upgraded fine but when I tried to add it back into the cluster - it stayed 'DOWN' and the reason was that an upstream interface showed as down.

I ran out of time so reverted back to R81.20 and the interface came back up. So physically there is not an issue. 

After a bit of reading I found the following:

"The R82.10 Architecture Shift: UPPAK (User Mode)

Starting natively in R82.10, Check Point has entirely decoupled its main processing engine from the standard Linux kernel space by moving entirely to UPPAK (User Plane Packet Processing) mode. 

• The Problem: In R81.20, your physical hardware interfaces used traditional kernel-space network drivers. In R82.10, the firewall bypasses the Linux kernel entirely for data interfaces, utilizing direct user-space hardware drivers (similar to DPDK architecture)"
• Fix is to change firewall and switch interfaces to auto-negotiate"

Has anyone experienced this before? Is this expected? 

Many thanks 

[DeanHCP]

If you don't mind me asking. Why do you have your network interfaces configured in the first place? Auto-negotiation in my experience, has been recommended for a very long time in networking, I've only seen it used when there are signal issues, bad cables, cheaper older switches etc than mean autonegotiation isn't able to settle to the correct level.

Just to highlight, I'm not a support employee, I'm interested in aspects of the move from KPPAK to UPPAK for my customers upgrading from R81.20 or R82. Another I found is that some older clustering methods are not supported and will throw an internal alert in HCP rather than stop you from having them configured.

[ccsjnw]

I still see some organisations locking the speed and duplex of their network interfaces on their infrastructure devices (Switches etc), in a misguided attempt to fix a problem that doesn't exist (ie failure to correctly negotiate speed and duplex). 

But the IEEE 802.3 standard states that auto-negotiate is a mandatory requirement for Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and it's been like this since 1998.

Often, the people configuring explicit speed and duplex settings, don't have a reason for doing it, other than it's always been done that way...

The only thing I'm mindful of is the spanning-tree configuration on the Switches, which by default will prioritise network loop detection, over immediate packet forwarding, which potentially could (but in all likelihood won't) affect the interface speed and duplex negotiating process - but it may cause delays when using Cluster XL on your Firewall Clusters.

Ensuring that you always use the spanning-tree postfast feature on Switch interfaces connected to other infrastructure devices (Switches, Firewalls etc.), is by far the best and most reliable solution (when you want to prioritise immediate packet forwarding) - assuming that you equipment rooms are secured, the risk of a network loop is very low in a well managed environment.

It's important not to assume that all Trunk ports default to postfast - while this may seem logical, it's not usually the case.

[Chris_Atkinson]

sk181564 describes how this might impact diagnosis, but some details are missing from your report.

Also where did you read this problem statement and fix, I think the context is important.

[Timothy_Hall]

Where did you find that summary after "a bit of reading"? It is pure LLM slop.

UPPAK does not stand for "User Plane Packet Processing"; it stands for User Space Performance Pack.  The drivers are not "similar to DPDK architecture"; they are the DPDK architecture.  Sigh.  I know this is the case because when I used Grammarly to proofread Max Power 2026, it kept trying to incorrectly substitute "User Plane" for the first two letters of the UPPAK acronym.

This kind of LLM slop has appeared before; last time around, the almighty LLMs thought UPPAK stood for "Universal Packet Processing Acceleration Kit".  

UPPAK Acronym?