Changes and New Feature History

Separate Lossless Buffer for Priorities 3 and 4

Added support for multiple lossless buffer configurations in PFC. The firmware now automatically calculates buffer sizes and maps priorities to their respective buffers.

DPA Partition Creation

Access control was added to ensure that only the VHCA instance that created a DPA partition is permitted to modify or delete it.

DPA TIMER

DPA TIMER functionality has been exposed through the MTCTR access register, allowing direct access by applications.

DPA Manifest

A new DPA Manifest mechanism was introduced to define and manage application permissions.

Passing Metadata Registers between the NIC Layer and the E-Switch (esw) Layer

This enhancement enables seamless metadata propagation across layers, allowing flow steering rules and packet processing logic to share contextual information such as flow identifiers, source context, or policy tags. It improves coordination between NIC and E-Switch pipelines, enabling more flexible traffic handling and advanced offload capabilities.

Parallel Suspends of VFs

Added support for parallel suspend operations across multiple VFs.

Enable/Disable ECN in Upstream

Added the ability to enable or disable ECN in the upstream by allowing the MODIFY_CONG_STATUS and QUERY_CONG_STATUS commands in mlx5_fwctl.

ADP-RETX Timeout Profile

Firmware now allows the ADP-RETX timeout profile to be configured even when there are open QPs.

RTT RTC Timestamp

Added support for using the real-time clock to fill the request and response timestamps in hardware-generated RTT packets.

To enable this feature, set REAL_TIME_CLOCK_ENABLE in mlxconfig and configure ROCE_CC_RTT_TIMESTAMP_FORMAT to 0x02 (REAL_TIME).

For additional details, see Known Issue 4496642 in the Known Issues section.

SPDM (Security Protocol and Data Model) Measurements

The SPDM (Security Protocol and Data Model) measurements reporting mechanism has been updated to comply with version 1.2.0 of the SPDM specification.

For further information refer to https://docs.nvidia.com/networking/display/dpunicattestation/connectx-7+measurements

Warm Boot when UPT VMs are Active

Added support for warm boot when UPT VMs are active, allowing the system to reboot without requiring a full shutdown of running VMs.

Bug Fixes

See Bug Fixes in this Firmware Version section.

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.

PCIe Congestion Events

Added support for the general PCIe congestion object to monitor and receive events related to inbound and outbound PCIe congestion. A threshold can be configured to specify when the firmware should send an event to the software.

This capability is activated by setting the mlxconfig parameter PCIE_CONGESTION_MONITOR.

Reading the Board ID from the EEPROM

Enabled reading the board ID from the EEPROM on the pluggable board and adjusting the configuration accordingly. For a 2×QSFP112 board (board_id=4), the firmware replaces the default 1×OSFP configuration with support for 2 QSFP ports.

Safely Identify DPUs/SmartNICs is a Machine and PCIe Slot

A new access register is introduced that accepts a type, length, and R/W command.

• Write operation: Allocates a new ICMC buffer of the specified size (aligned to 64B) and stores the provided data. If a buffer for the given type already exists, the data in the ICMC is overwritten, and the locked area is adjusted accordingly

• Read operation: If a buffer exists, its data is copied out. If not, the access register returns a size of 0 or an explicit error

The length can be stored within the data in the ICMC, and the type is mapped to 256B chunks (due to access register limitations), so the VA of the buffer is calculated as (base + (type << 8)). The first 4 bytes store a validity flag and the length. If length storage is unnecessary (e.g., null-terminated data), a hardware read can use a cache-line hit as a validity bit.

This feature is designed for limited use cases and does not address multi-host scenarios or broader ICMC utilization implications.

RSS with Crypto Offload

Added support for RSS with crypto offload enabling the NIC to parallelize packet processing across CPU cores while performing encryption/decryption in hardware. Additionally, introduced a new l4_type_ext parameter with values: 0 (None), 1 (TCP), 2 (UDP), 3 (ICMP).

Incoming NC-SI Messages Validation for the payload_len Field

Added an extra validation for the payload_len field in incoming NC-SI messages. Previously, invalid packets might have been accepted; now, such packets are silently dropped.

Bug Fixes

See Bug Fixes in this Firmware Version section.

SPDM

Introduced a 1ms delay for SPDM responses.

Bug Fixes

See Bug Fixes in this Firmware Version section.