ConnectX-4 Adapter Cards Firmware Release Notes v12.27.1016
NVIDIA ConnectX-5 Adapter Cards Firmware Release Notes v16.35.3502 LTS

Changes and New Feature History

Warning

This section includes history of changes and new feature of 3 major releases back. For older releases history, please refer to the relevant firmware versions.

Feature/Change

Description

Rev. 12.26.4012

Globally Disable RoCE through MST

Enables the user to globally disable RoCE on init by writing to the access register NCFG_REG.

Zero-Touch RoCE (ZTR) Slow Start

Enabled Zero-Touch RoCE (ZTR) slow start capability for responder flows.

Resource Dump

Extracts and prints data segments generated by the firmware.

Bug Fixes

See Bug Fixes History.

Rev. 12.26.1040

ICMD and Diagnostic Counters

Enabled the firmware by using the ICMD commands to deal with diagnostic counters similar to cmdif. They can be called via the vsec space. The counters’ values are returned only via the tracer. The ICMD Query Caps indicate support and expose the list of the supported counters.

User Context Object (DEVX)

This is a containerized sandbox per user, to access PRM command securely by using General Object commands, UMEM and UCTX contexts. The allowed functionalities of this capability depend on the user permissions.

The following functionalities are still managed by the Kernel:

  • Resource cleaning

  • UCTX stamping

  • Blocking the physical address and IRQ from these UCTX

DEVX Support for Asynchronous Events

Added support for reporting the supported affiliated and unaffiliated asynchronous events to DEVX users through the command interface.

Zero-Touch-RoCE Counters

Zero-Touch-RoCE counters are now available to the user for debuggability purposes when using the Zero-Touch-RoCE feature.

Security Hardening Enhancements

This release contains important reliability improvements and security hardening enhancements.

Mellanox recommends upgrading your device firmware to this release to improve the device firmware security and reliability.

Bug Fixes

See Bug Fixes History.

Rev. 12.25.1020

VSC Security

VSC security includes the mechanisms which will prevent a reasonable host from affecting other hosts from using VSC.

ODP support for SRQ & XRC

Added support for send opcode operations targeting a SRQ/RMP with the receive WQEs using ODP memory. In case the receive WQE receives an ODP, the device will generate ODP notifications (EQE) and PFAULT will abort CQEs.

Note: It is recommended to prefetch the memory used by the receive WQEs to reduce ODP occurrence as these have significant latencies and will cause a performance degradation.

Auto-Sensing when using 25/10GbE Optical Modules

This new capability accelerates the network to auto-sense the port speed and use it when using a 25/10GbE optical module. Meaning, if the used module is 25GbE but the port is a 10GbE port, the speed used for that network will be 10GbE.

Package ID

Enabled Package ID configuration using server strap according OCP 3.0.

DPDK UIO

This capability provides a solution for improving user space drivers development, generic user space IO device services.

mlxconfig

Renamed the BOOT_RETRY_CNT1 parameter to BOOT_RETRY_CNT.

Reduced Firmware Upgrade Time

Reduced firmware upgrade time using mlxfwreset tool to ~3 seconds. Using this capability requires enabling PARTIAL_RESET_EN in mlxconfig and using MFT version 4.12.0 and up. The “PARTIAL” refers to not resetting the port modules (which is not mandatory for firmware upgrades).

Note: Currently this capability only supports firmware upgrade and downgrades to firmware versions newer than XX.25.1020.

Bug Fixes

See Bug Fixes History.

Rev. 12.24.1000

Layer 3 Encapsulation

Added support for an additional layer (Layer 3) of packet processing at the hypervisor level that enables adding and removing protocol headers (e.g., the MAC address is removed during encapsulation, and added during decapsulation) for the encapsulated traffic.

e-switch Steering Rule

Enabled e-switch steering rule in the NIC without matching it with the Directional MACs (DMAC) protocol. Now the rule is only according to the MC/UC bit.

IB Sniffer Tool

The IB Sniffer utility provides the user the ability to capture the e- switch traffic directly to a hypervisor queue.

Transmission Histogram Counters

Added support for the transmission histogram counter set as part of the Ethernet extended group counters.

Events Generation by the Hardware upon Counter Incrementation

Enabled the hardware to generate an event upon counter incrementation, in order to reduce an overhead from the software from reading rarely updated counters such as error counters.

NODNIC Connectivity

Enables NOIDNIC connectivity to the network through the e-switch and not directly to the physical port.

QP and Mkey Values

Enabled setting the QP and the Mkey values by the software upon these resources creation.

PCIe Atomic

Enabled advanced PCIe atomic operations. The HCA will perform PCIe atomic operations as a requestor towards the host memory when receiving compatible atomic messages from the network, and according to the configuration of NV_SW_OFFLOAD_CONFIG pci_atomic_mode field and the PCI AtomicOp Requester Enable bit in the Device Control 2 register.

TIR Destination from the FDB

Enabled a single TIR destination from the FDB.

WRED

Changed the WRED default mode to OFF for Multi-Host adapter cards.

TX Steering Rule on in WQE Ethernet Segment

Added support for TX steering rule on flow_table_metadata in WQE Ethernet segment.

L3 Encapsulation/Decapsulation in the Reformat Context Allocation

Added L3 encapsulation/decapsulation support in the reformat context allocation.

  • L3 encapsulation removes L2 headers and adds generic L3 tunnel encapsulation.

  • L3 decapsulation removes the generic L3 tunnel decapsulation and L2 header.

Flow Steering Header Modification

Added support for flow steering header modification (header rewrite) for IPv4 TTL header for loopback traffic (VF-VF/VF-PF).

Note: TTL modification for traffic from the network is currently not supported.

Teardown: Fast Mode

[Developers only] Moved the fast teardown HCA cap bit to offset 0x1c.4:1.

Virtual Functions/QoS

Enabled Virtual Functions to read QPDPM/QPDP/QPTS.

Message vs. Payload based flow control QP Configuration

Added support for requester QP packet based on E2E credits mode. The new flow control supports HCA-to-switch RDMA traffic packet-based End-2-End.

Multi PCI RDMA IB

This capability enables the user to expose two PCI/IB devices per network port.

Steering

Enabled a single TIR destination from the FDB.

Note: TTL modification in the FDB for traffic from the network is currently not supported.

Bug Fixes

See Bug Fixes History.

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