This User Manual describes the installation, configuration and operation of Mellanox WinOF driver.
Mellanox WinOF is composed of several software modules that contain InfiniBand and Ethernet drivers for ConnectX-3 and ConnectX-3 Pro adapter cards. The Mellanox WinOF driver supports 10, 40 or 56 Gb/s Ethernet, and 40 or 56 Gb/s InfiniBand network ports. The port type is determined upon boot based on card capabilities and user settings.
The Mellanox VPI WinOF driver release introduces the following capabilities:
Support for Single and Dual port Adapters
Up to 16 Rx queues per port
Rx steering mode (RSS)
Hardware Tx/Rx checksum calculation
Large Send offload (i.e., TCP Segmentation Offload)
Hardware multicast filtering
Adaptive interrupt moderation
Support for MSI-X interrupts
Support for Auto-Sensing of Link level protocol
NDK with SMB-Direct
NDv1 and v2 API support in user space
VMQ for Hypervisor
CIM and PowerShell
Ethernet only capabilities:
Hardware VLAN filtering
Header Data Split
RDMA over Converged Ethernet
RoCE MAC Based (v1)
RoCE IP Based (v1)
RoCE over UDP (v2)
DSCP over IPv4
NVGRE hardware off-load in ConnectX®-3 Pro
Ports TX arbitration/Bandwidth allocation per port
Ports RX arbitration
Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS)
SR-IOV Ethernet on Windows Server 2012 R2/2016 Hypervisor with Windows Server 2012 R2 and above guests
Virtual Machine Multiple Queue (VMMQ)
Network Direct Kernel Provider Interface
PacketDirect Provider Interface
InfiniBand only capabilities:
SR-IOV over KVM Hypervisor
Diagnostic tools
For the complete list of Ethernet and InfiniBand Known Issues and Limitations, see WinOF Release Notes (www.mellanox.com → Products → Software → InfiniBand/VPI Drivers → Windows SW/Drivers).
Intended Audience
This manual is intended for system administrators responsible for the installation, configuration, management and maintenance of the software and hardware of VPI (InfiniBand, Ethernet) ConnectX-3 and ConnectX-3 Pro adapter cards. It is also intended for application developers.
Mellanox WinOF driver includes the following package:
MLNX_VPI_WinOF-<version>_All_<OS>_<arch>.exe:
In this package, the port default is auto and RoCE v2 is enabled.
Under <installation_directory>\Documentation:
License file
User Manual (this document)
MLNX_VPI_WinOF Release Notes
Message Passing Interface (MPI) is meant to provide virtual topology, synchronization, and communication functionality between a set of processes. MPI enables running one process on several hosts.
Windows MPI runs over the following protocols:
Sockets (Ethernet)
Network Direct (ND)
For further details on MPI, please refer to Appendix: Windows MPI (MS-MPI).