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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.

See also Document Conventions and Related Documents.

Supplied Packages

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.

WinOF Set of Documentation

Under <installation_directory>\Documentation:

  • License file
  • User Manual (this document)
  • MLNX_VPI_WinOF Release Notes

Windows MPI (MS-MPI)

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).