NVIDIA DOCA Profiles

The following document provides an introduction to the various supported DOCA-Host profiles.

NVIDIA DOCA™ can be installed on the host and used by a variety of customers who have different workloads and requirements. The DOCA-Host package includes drivers, libraries, and tools to support NVIDIA® BlueField® Networking Platform and NVIDIA® ConnectX® SmartNIC, Ethernet and InfiniBand, with both kernel and user-space components. Depending on their specific needs, customers may choose not to install the full DOCA-Host package on their host server but only the subset of components and tools relevant for their use case (whether to have a smaller installation size, lower integration/validation effort, etc).

To support the different use cases, DOCA includes DOCA-Host Installation Profiles, which are a subset of the full DOCA installation. DOCA-Host profiles are validated and tested installation packages. The following are the available DOCA profiles:

• doca-all
• doca-networking
• doca-ofed

DOCA-Host supports the following NVIDIA devices:

• BlueField-3
• BlueField-2
• ConnectX-7
• ConnectX-6 DX
• ConnectX-6 LX
• ConnectX-6
• ConnectX-5
• ConnectX-4 LX
• ConnectX-4

For hardware details on these devices, refer to the following pages:

• BlueField devices
• ConnectX devices

DOCA functionality is limited by the specific device capabilities.

The full DOCA-Host installation is intended for users who wish to utilize the full extent of DOCA libs and drivers.

This profile is the super-set of components, which also includes the content of doca-ofed and doca-networking.

All DOCA libraries, drivers and tools are included in doca-all.

The doca-networking profile is intended for users who wish to benefit only from the networking functionality of DOCA.

The content of the doca-networking package is the following:

• MLNX_OFED
• DOCA Core
• MLNX-DPDK
• OVS-DOCA
• DOCA Flow

This profile is intended for users who wish to have the same user experience and content as MLNX_OFED but with DOCA package. doca-ofed installs the MLNX_OFED drivers and tools and does not include any other DOCA components.

The content of the doca-ofed package is:

• MLNX_OFED drivers and tools

Selecting the right DOCA-Host installation profile is important to fully utilize the capabilities of your BlueField Platforms or ConnectX.

The functionality of DOCA-Host is limited by the device capabilities (e.g., ConnectX devices cannot utilize DOCA libs such as DPA, even if doca-all is installed on the host).

For BlueField devices:

• It is recommended to use doca-all

• If you require the smallest installation package for networking-only purposes, use doca-networking

• For MLNX_OFED-like installation, use doca-ofed (no additional DOCA functionality)

For ConnectX devices:

• It is recommended to use doca-networking

• For future-proof and mixed BlueField/ConnectX deployments, use doca-all

• For MLNX_OFED-like installation use doca-ofed (no additional DOCA functionality)

DOCA-Host can be installed on specific host OSs. Each of the Host Installation Profiles has specific OSs on which is can be installed as specified in section “Supported Host OS per DOCA-Host Installation Profile”.

Follow the instructions under section " Installing Software on Host” in th e NVIDIA DOCA Installation Guide for Linux.

The default operating system included with the BlueField Bundle (for DPU and SuperNIC) is Ubuntu 22.04.

The supported operating systems on the host machine per DOCA-Host installation profile are the following: