Changes and New Features
DOCA 2.9.0 (and its LTS branch) is the final software version to support NVIDIA® ConnectX®-4 device. Starting January '25, ConnectX-4 will no longer be supported by future DOCA-Host releases.
NVIDIA® BlueField®-3 networking platforms are required to use DOCA-Host as the host driver. MLNX_OFED does not support BlueField-3 devices.
DOCA 2.9.0 (and its LTS branch) does not support ConnectX-8 device.
- Added support for Spectrum-X 1.2 RA 
- Added beta-level support for Quantum-X800 (XDR speed) 
- OVN Bare-metal – Added support for tenant Isolation for E-W and N-S 
- DOCA Telemetry library - Added support for high-frequency sampling and load-balancing between central observability DBs 
- DOCA Flow – performance analysis tool, live upgrade, FDB RSS pipe support in switch model 
- DOCA Flow – - pkt_metafield has been changed to big endian
- Added GA support for OVS-DOCA and local mirroring 
- Added support for HBN on SimX, HBN LTS, PBR, and improved scale 
- Added alpha-level support for DOCA RDMA on GPU 
- Virtio-net scale 1K devices – optimizations, service restart flow for VFE, and support for hotplug/unplug on a virtio device during host power-off/power-cycle 
- Added support for virtio-net-controller high availability (HA) to minimize per device down time 
- Virtio-blk – improved recovery time and hotplug/unplug flow 
- Firefly service – SyncE, DTS 
- Rivermax – IPMX ProAV, H4M, GFN license server 
- App Shield Lib – added POC-level support for NIM container threat detection 
- Storage – - Added alpha-level support for target offload for BlueField-3 storage controller 
- Added beta-level support for SNAP virtio-fs 
 
- DOCA-Host new profile – DOCA-ROCE 
- Added GA support for DOCA Management Service (DMS) 
- Data Path Acceleration – Added support for: - DPA tooling for customer apps perf tuning 
- Beta-level DOCA DPA comms 
- Performance counters 
- Queue-access function optimization 
- DPA side RQ to allow zero pad 
 
- DOCA DMA perf improvements 
- DOCA Comm Channel – new Comch support, and deprecation of old Comm Channel 
- Changed from using proprietary - strongSwan-bfto using upstream strongSwan
The following changes in DOCA 2.9.0 (BSP 4.9.0) and BMC 24.10-LTSU1 break backward compatibility and therefore require customers to upgrade all DOCA software components to the latest available version to avoid anomalous behavior:
| Software Component | Change Description | 
| BMC | IPMB channel relocation – The IPMB channel used by the BlueField BMC to retrieve data from the BlueField Arm is now utilizing a dedicated I2C interface. This change is aimed at improving the serviceability of the interface. | 
| FlexIO | Fixing a mandatory hardware limitation found the updated firmware version breaks backward compatibility between the software layer |