Changes and New Features

Support Representor Metering Over SFs

[ConnectX-6 Dx and above and BlueField-2] Extended the support of representor metering from supporting only VFs representor to also supporting SFs representor.

Exposing Error Counters on a VPort Manager

[ConnectX-4 and above] Added support for exposing error counters on a VPort manager function for all other VPorts.
These counters can be used to detect malicious users who are exploiting flows that can slow the device.
The counters are exposed through debugfs under: /sys/kernel/debug/mlx5/esw/<func>/vnic_diag/

Memory Consumption Minimization

[ConnectX-4 and above] Added support for providing knobs which enable users to minimize memory consumption of mlx5 functions (PF/VF/SF).

XDP Support for Uplink Representors

[ConnectX-5 and ConnectX-6 Dx) Added XDP support for uplink representors in switchdev mode.

Resiliency to tx_port_ts

[ConnectX-6 Dx and above] Added resiliency to the tx_port_ts feature. private-flag may be enabled via ethtool tx_port_ts which provides a more accurate time-stamp. In very rare cases, the said time-stamp was lost, leading to losing the synchronization altogether. This feature allows for fast recovery and allows to quickly regain synchronization.

Database of Devlink Health Asserts

[ConnectX-4 and above] Health buffer now contains more debug information like the epoch time in sec of the error and the error's severity. The print to dmesg is done with the debug level corresponding to the error's severity. This allows the user to use dmesg attribute: dmesg --level to focus on different severity levels of firmware errors.

Expose FEC Counters via Ethtool

[ConnectX-5 and above] Exposed the following FEC (forward error detection) counters:

ETHTOOL_A_FEC_STAT_CORRECTED

• fc_fec_corrected_blocks_laneX

• rs_fec_corrected_blocks

ETHTOOL_A_FEC_STAT_UNCORR

• fc_fec_uncorrectable_blocks_laneX

• rs_fec_uncorrectable_blocks

ETHTOOL_A_FEC_STAT_CORR_BITS

• phy_corrected_bits

Command: ethtool -I show-fec <ifc>

Application Device Queues

[ConnectX-4 and above] Added driver-level support for Application Device Queues. This feature allows partition defining over the RX/TX queues into groups and isolates traffic of different applications. This mainly improves predictability and tail latency.

Reinjection of Packets Into Kernel

[All HCAs] Added support for a new software steering action, mlx5dv_dr_action_create_dest_root_table(). This action can be used to forward packets back into a level 0 table.
As a table with level 0 is the kernel owned table, this will result in injecting packets to the kernel steering pipeline.

DCT LAG

[ConnectX-6 Dx and above] Added firmware support to allow explicit port selection based on steering and not QP affinity.

Functionality:

1. Use LAG Hash Mode for the HCA with two ports, if supported.

2. Keep port affinity function in LAG Hash Mode if it supports bypass select flow table in non-SwitchDev mode.

AES-XTS in RDMA

Added support for plaintext AES-XTS DEKs.

General

Bug fixes

Multi-Block Encryption

Multi-block encryption is currently unsupported, due to a hardware limitation.