Changes and New Features History

VXLAN Hardware Stateless Offloads

VXLAN technology provides scalability and security challenges solutions. It requires extension of the traditional stateless offloads to avoid performance drop. ConnectX family cards offer the following stateless offloads for a VXLAN packet, similar to the ones offered to non-encapsulated packets. VXLAN protocol encapsulates its packets using outer UDP header.

For further information see VXLAN Hardware Stateless Offloads.

NUMA Domain Support in mlx5en(4)

All control memory, DMA descriptor memory and firmware pages try to allocate resources from the closest so-called NUMA domain node to reduce latency and memory bus congestion. If the targeted NUMA domain node is out-of-memory, another NUMA domain node will be used to allocate the memory. The NUMA domain support in the driver has no tunable knobs.

The following shell command will output the default NUMA domain node for the specified mlx5 core instance:

sysctl dev.mlx5_core.<N>.%domain

Kernel Transport Layer Security (kTLS) Offloads

Added support for hardware offload encryption of Tx TLS traffic over ConnectX-6 Dx and above adapter cards.

Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) Support

Added support for creating and destroying virtual functions (VFs) in the FreeBSD host.

Port Diagnostics

Added support for the driver to extract information from the hardware in order to easily detect the reason for the port link to be in inactive state.

SR-IOV over ESXi

Added support for SR-IOV Guest over ESXi.

Note

: Certain earlier versions of VMware prevented proper function of MS/MSI-X emulation on FreeBSD Guests. Since these versions are not accurately accounted for, MSI is blacklisted by default, preventing mlx5(4) driver from loading properly.
If MS/MSI-X emulation does not function properly on your current hypervisor, you may set the loader tunables hw.pci.enable_msi and hw.pci.enable_msix to 1, and hw.pci.honor_msi_blacklist to 0.

Forward Error Correction (FEC) Configuration

Added support for FEC configuration via the FreeBSD driver.

IRQ Labeling

IRQ IDs are now labeled according to their Mellanox device functionality.

Priority Flow Control (PFC) Hardware Buffer Configuration

Port Module Events

Added counters for various port module events.

ConnectX-6 Firmware Dump

Expanded firmware dump support for ConnectX-6 adapter cards.

Bug Fixes

See .Bug Fixes in this Version v3.7.0.