Changes and New Features

Category

Description

Cables

Added a notification pop-up upon bad cable state in the event viewer.

Congestion Control

Added support for Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to avoid congestion hot spots and optimize the throughput of the fabric.

Data Center Bridging Exchange (DCBX)

DCBX is used by DCB devices to exchange configuration information with directly connected peers. DCBX uses Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) to exchange parameters between two link peers.

DCBX

Added support for Data Center Bridging Exchange Protocol at GA level

Dump Me Now (DMN)

Added support for DMN to generate dumps and traces for:

  • General information

  • QP specifics

  • SR-IOV

ECN

The default values for ECN configuration are now taken from the firmware. It is still possible to configure the ECN parameters from the driver.

Ethernet

Added Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP), a mechanism that uses the 6- bit Differentiated Services Field (DS or DSCP field) in the IP header for packet classification.

Ethernet

Added a resilience mechanism that stops transmission of pauses from the NIC port if pauses are sent for a long period of time.

Ethernet

Added the ability to handle packet bursts, while avoiding packet drops that may occur when a large number of packets is sent in a short period of time.

Ethernet

Added Head of Queue Lifetime Limit, a feature that enables the system to drop the packets that have been awaiting transmission for a long period of time, preventing the system from hanging.

Event Log

Added an event log in case the server reaches a certain (configurable) high tem- perature.

Event Log Messages

Added the following new event log message in case firmware events are reported:

  • Transmit engine hang

  • Receive hang

Note: The resiliency flow is disabled by default for WinOF-2 v1.90 thus the driver will ignore these events when reported.

InfiniBand

Added support for InfiniBand and IPoIB including EDR link speed.

MTT Optimization

Hardware resource utilization improvement for RDMA applications that use con- tiguous memory buffers

NDKPI

Added support for NDKPI v2.0 interface.

PacketDirect

Added support for PacketDirect Provider Interface (PDPI).

Performance

Added threaded DPC support.

Performance

Optimized MSI-X interrupt vectors’ usage to enable efficient work on machines with high core counts.

Performance

Improved RDMA latency, RoCE with high scale and cache line alignments.

QoS

Priority Flow Control (PFC) is at GA level.

QoS

Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) is at GA level.

Quality of Service

QoS classification of received packets can now consider the DSCP value in addi- tion to the PCP value.

RDMA

Added the host’s ability to control RDMA per VM. The host can turn RDMA on/off for a specific VM without affecting other VMs.

RDMA

Added NDK (Network Direct Kernel) v3 support.

RDMA

Enabled by default RDMA in the VF from the host, using the Enablegues- tRdma registry key.

RDMA

Removed the RssMaxProcNumber registry key from the registry, and the "RSS Maximum Processor Number" from the UI.

RDMA

Added RDMA transport diagnostic counters.

RDMA

Changed the default value of RoCE mode from v1 to v2.

RDMA

Added the option to configure the RoCE version per adapter.

RDMA

Changed UDP source port calculation according to IB spec.

Receive Path Activity Monitoring

Monitors the devices status continuously tot when the receive pipeline is stalled for a period longer than a pre-configured timeout.

RoCEv2 Congestion Management (RCM)

Switches running ECN will report congestion to the sources using CNP messages. The sources (Host), in turn, react by throttling down their injection rates, thus pre- venting congestion in the fabric.

SR-IOV

Enabled Windows SR-IOV Enhanced eIPoIB (without Secure Connection).

SR-IOV

Added the ability to load the driver on devices configured for SR-IOV and IPoIB, with no SR-IOV support.

SR-IOV

SR-IOV is at GA level.

SR-IOV

Added support for SR-IOV mode for Windows VM over Linux KVM hypervisor.

Virtualization

Added support for Linux VF over Hyper-V (Windows PF).

Virtualization

Added the ability to limit the number of memory pages in the host that are used for contexts of VF resources.

Virtualization

Extended SR-IOV support for up to 96 VFs per port.

Virtualization

Added support for RoCE in SR-IOV VM.

Virtualization

Added support for RoCE in virtualization mode in the hypervisor.

Virtualization

Added support for “VMMQ” - RSS load-balancing offload in HW for non-SRIOV VMs.

Note: RSS for SR-IOV VMs is already available in older versions.

VXLAN Stateless Offload

Added support for send/receive checksum, LSOv2 and VMQ hardware offloads on VXLAN encapsulated frames.

Wake On LAN

Added the option for a network admin to remotely power on a system or wake it up from sleep mode.

WPP Traces Extraction

WinOF-2 Mellanox driver automatically dumps trace messages that can be used for debugging issues that have recently occurred on the machine.

The following are the unsupported functionalities/features in WinOF-2:

  • Non-default PKeys in IPoIB

  • Network Direct SPI

© Copyright 2023, NVIDIA. Last updated on Aug 31, 2023.