Changes and New Features

NVIDIA ConnectX-5 Adapter Cards Firmware Release Notes v16.35.3502 LTS
Warning

SR-IOV - Virtual Functions (VF) per Port - The maximum Virtual Functions (VF) per port is 127. For further information, see Known Issues.

Warning

It is recommended to enable the “above 4G decoding” BIOS setting for features that require large amount of PCIe resources.

Such features are: SR-IOV with numerous VFs, PCIe Emulated Switch, and Large BAR Requests.

Warning

Security Hardening Enhancements: This release contains important reliability improvements and security hardening enhancements. NVIDIA recommends upgrading your devices’ firmware to this release to improve the devices’ firmware security and reliability.

Feature/Change

Description

22.37.1014

Mergeable Buffer

Added mergeable buffer support (VIRTIO_NET_F_MRG_RXBUF in virtio spec) for VDPA kernel mode to improve performance in case of large MTU such as 9K. The feature is disabled by default and must be manually enabled while creating or modifying the virtio device.

Note: For best performance, it is NOT recommended to enable the feature if the VDPA MTU is set to the default value (1500).

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.

PCC Algorithms

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

PCC Firmware Trace

Added support for running PCC firmware trace without saving and sending the DB strings to the tool with the following changes:

  • Added new string section to the user PCC image creation tool

  • Added the new PCC DB strings to MTRC access registers output

  • On the tool’s part: added support to reading the string.db using the MTRC access registers

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.

Bug Fixes

See Bug Fixes in this Firmware Version section.

Unsupported Features

The following advanced feature are unsupported in the current firmware version:

  • The following service types:

    • SyncUMR

    • Mellanox transport

    • RAW IPv6

  • INT-A not supported for EQs only MSI-X

  • PCI VPD write flow (RO flow supported)

  • Streaming Receive Queue (STRQ) and collapsed CQ

  • Subnet Manager (SM) on VFs

  • RoCE LAG in Multi-Host/Socket-Direct

Unsupported Commands

  • QUERY_MAD_DEMUX

  • SET_MAD_DEMUX

  • CREATE_RQ - MEMORY_RQ_RMP

  • MODIFY_LAG_ASYNC_EVENT

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