Changes and New Feature History

General

This is the initial firmware release of NVIDIA BlueField-3 SmartNICs.

Return DPU to 'out of factory' State

Enables the user to return DPU to 'out of factory' state. This capability provides an option to 're-use' the DPUs to allow easy switch of tenants in bare-metal by clearing all the DPU data, and then re-provision it.

1k Emulated virtio-blk Devices

The virtio-blk device presents a block device to the Virtual Machine and offers high performance due to a thin software stack.

This version supports 1k emulated virtio-blk devices.

A typical configuration for this capability is:

• 4 virtio-blk PFs and 253 virtio-blk VFs on each PF

or

• 8 virtio-blk PFs and 126 virtio-blk VFs on each PF

Geneve

GENEVE hardware offload enables the traditional offloads to be performed on the encapsulated traffic. The data center operators can decouple the overlay network layer from the physical NIC performance, thus achieving native performance in the new network architecture.

Monitoring Cloud Guest RoCE Statistics on Cloud Provider

This new capability enables the VM to track and limit its Vport's activity. This is done using the new q_counters counter which enables aggregation of other Vport's from PF GVMI.

Linux Bridge Offload

Added a flow rule that enables offloading of multicast traffic by broadcasting it to multi-Flow-Table in FDB.

Selective Repeat

Selective repeat improves network utilization in case of a lossy fabric. This features is enabled by default.

Provisioning Flow

Provisioning flow enables the user to "clean" flash data, and reprogram the flash and and the NIC.

Dynamic VF MSIX Allocation

Added support for dynamic MSIX modification on a VF NVME device emulation.

If a PF NVME device emulation is created with dynamic_vf_msix_control = 1, then the dynamic_vf_msix_reset can set the PF device emulation's VF MSIX number to 0. The num_msix is used in the modified VF device emulation to modify the MSIX number of the VF device emulation.

InfiniBand Congestion Control (IB CC)

Enabled IB CC per Service Level (SL) for RC/UC on the HCA side.
Now different SLs can be configured to be CC on/off according to the bitmask decided by the software.

Hardware Steering: Bulk Allocation

Added support for 32 actions in the header modify pattern using bulk allocation.

InfiniBand Congestion Control - RTT Response Service Level

The software can explicitly set the SL of an RTT response packet, instead of it being taken from the RTT request packet's SL.

The RTT response packet SL may be set/queried via the CONGESTION_CONTROL_HCA_NP_PARAMETER MAD.

PCC Algorithms

Enables a smooth and statically switch between PCC algorithms. In addition, the user can now switch between PCC algorithms while running traffic.

IPSEC Side Acceleration with DPDK

[Beta] Added support for crypto (GCM) via the MMO engine.

AES-XTS

Added the ability to increase the tweak for every AES-XTS block by (1<<64) instead of by 1.