The following is a functional diagram of the NVIDIA® BlueField® DPU.
For each one of the BlueField DPU network ports, there are 2 physical PCIe networking functions exposed:
To the embedded Arm subsystem
To the host over PCIe
The mlx5 drivers and their corresponding software stacks must be loaded on both hosts (Arm and the host server). The OS running on each one of the hosts would probe the drivers. BlueField-2 network interfaces are compatible with NVIDIA® ConnectX®-6 and higher. BlueField network interfaces are compatible with ConnectX-5 and higher.
The same network drivers are used both for BlueField and the ConnectX NIC family.