Changes and New Feature History

DOCA Programmable Congestion Control

This new capability enables the user to control the programmability of congestion control based on DOCA including APIs, libraries, reference applications and advanced features such as high availability.

Header Modification

Added support to the metadata reg_c 8-11 (packet fields) for matching and modifying the header, and Advanced Steering Operation (ASO) actions.

Precision Time Protocol (PTP)

Added support for PTP on 200G port link speed. PTP uses an algorithm and method for synchronizing clocks on various devices across packet-based networks to provide sub-microsecond accuracy. NVIDIA Spectrum supports PTP in both one-step and two-step modes and can serve either as a boundary or a transparent clock.

INT Packets

Added support for forwarding INT packets to the user application for monitoring purposes by matching the BTH acknowledge request bit (bth_a).

Crypto Support (GCM algorithm)

Added crypto support (GCM algorithm) via the Memory-to-Memory offload (MMO) engine.

NC-SI, Strap Values

Implemented NVIDIA NC-SI OEM command query_strap_options (command 0x0, parameter 0x34).

mlxconfig

Implemented the following mlxconfig parameters related to the sideband interface enable/disable method:

• PCIE_IN_BAND_VDM_DISABLE: When TRUE, the management processor will disable PCIe in-band VDM (MCTP over PCIe) interface.

• PCIE_SMBUS_DISABLE: When TRUE, the management processor will disable SMBUS (embedded on the PCIe connector) interface.

• RBT_DISABLE: When TRUE, the management processor will disable RBT interface.

• PLDM_FW_UPDATE_DISABLE: When TRUE, PLDM FW update over PCIe and SMBUS are disabled.

• HM_RDE_DISABLE: When TRUE, RDE over PCIe and SMBUS are disabled.

AES-XTS

Added the ability to increase the tweak for every block by (1<<64) instead of by 1 in AES-XTS.

DPA PROCESS ERROR

Added support for a new value for coredump_type field in DPA_PROCESS_COREDUMP, [FIRST_ERROR_THREAD_DUMP (1).].

Bug Fixes

See Bug Fixes in this Firmware Version section.

General

This is the initial firmware release of NVIDIA BlueField-3 SmartNICs.

Return DPU to 'out of factory' State

Enables the user to return DPU to 'out of factory' state. This capability provides an option to 're-use' the DPUs to allow easy switch of tenants in bare-metal by clearing all the DPU data, and then re-provision it.

1k Emulated virtio-blk Devices

The virtio-blk device presents a block device to the Virtual Machine and offers high performance due to a thin software stack.

This version supports 1k emulated virtio-blk devices.

A typical configuration for this capability is:

• 4 virtio-blk PFs and 253 virtio-blk VFs on each PF

or

• 8 virtio-blk PFs and 126 virtio-blk VFs on each PF

Geneve

GENEVE hardware offload enables the traditional offloads to be performed on the encapsulated traffic. The data center operators can decouple the overlay network layer from the physical NIC performance, thus achieving native performance in the new network architecture.

Monitoring Cloud Guest RoCE Statistics on Cloud Provider

This new capability enables the VM to track and limit its Vport's activity. This is done using the new q_counters counter which enables aggregation of other Vport's from PF GVMI.

Linux Bridge Offload

Added a flow rule that enables offloading of multicast traffic by broadcasting it to multi-Flow-Table in FDB.

Selective Repeat

Selective repeat improves network utilization in case of a lossy fabric. This features is enabled by default.

Provisioning Flow

Provisioning flow enables the user to "clean" flash data, and reprogram the flash and and the NIC.

Dynamic VF MSIX Allocation

Added support for dynamic MSIX modification on a VF NVME device emulation.

If a PF NVME device emulation is created with dynamic_vf_msix_control = 1, then the dynamic_vf_msix_reset can set the PF device emulation's VF MSIX number to 0. The num_msix is used in the modified VF device emulation to modify the MSIX number of the VF device emulation.

InfiniBand Congestion Control (IB CC)

Enabled IB CC per Service Level (SL) for RC/UC on the HCA side.

Now different SLs can be configured to be CC on/off according to the bitmask decided by the software.

Hardware Steering: Bulk Allocation

Added support for 32 actions in the header modify pattern using bulk allocation.

InfiniBand Congestion Control - RTT Response Service Level

The software can explicitly set the SL of an RTT response packet, instead of it being taken from the RTT request packet's SL.

The RTT response packet SL may be set/queried via the CONGESTION_CONTROL_HCA_NP_PARAMETER MAD.

PCC Algorithms

Enables a smooth and statically switch between PCC algorithms. In addition, the user can now switch between PCC algorithms while running traffic.

IPSEC Side Acceleration with DPDK

[Beta] Added support for crypto (GCM) via the MMO engine.

AES-XTS

Added the ability to increase the tweak for every AES-XTS block by (1<<64) instead of by 1.