NVIDIA WinOF-2 Documentation v23.10
1.0

NVIDIA BlueField SmartNIC Mode

The NVIDIA® BlueField® family of (Data Processing Unit) DPU devices combines an array of Arm processors coupled with the NVIDIA® ConnectX® interconnect. Standard Linux distributions run on the Arm cores allowing common open source development tools to be used. The SoC can be accessed via USB (external cable) or PCIe driven by our RShim drivers. RShim drivers provides functionalities like resetting the Arm cores, pushing a bootstream image, networking functionality and console functionality.

For further information see RShim Drivers and Usage.

When the adapter is in SmartNIC mode, the following features are controlled from System-On-Chip (SoC) side. For more information on NVIDIA® BlueField® and functionality, please refer to NVIDIA BlueField Family Documentation → BlueField Software Overview.

  • Performance counters – Cannot query Mellanox WinOF-2 PCI Device Diagnostics

  • Cannot query/modify VF capabilities from Windows host

  • Dropless mode query/set is not supported from the host side

  • When performing MlxFwReset (one of our MFT tools), need to disable host network adapters manually and wait until SoC is up before enabling them

  • Open vSwitch (OVS) running on the Arm cores allows Virtual Machines (VMs) to communicate with each other and with the outside world. For more details on OVS, please refer to NVIDIA BlueField Family Documentation.

  • OpenvSwitch (OVS) running on the Arm cores supports two modes:

    • hardware offload mode enabled - With Hardware offload enabled (default mode), the first few packets are processed by the OVS for learning and rule injection which can be processed in parallel thus, test fails because packets go out-of-order to the host (windows driver).

    • hardware offload mode disabled - With Hardware Offload disabled, all packets go through the Arm core and cannot keep up with heavy network traffic. To overcome this limitation, and to make it easy for customers who want to run certification, we provide two scripts under /opt/mellanox/hlk.

      Please execute "/opt/mellanox/hlk/mlnx-pre-hlk" from the SoC before starting the HLK tests and after done, execute "/opt/mellanox/hlk/mlnx-post-hlk" to enable OVS and delete manually programmed rules.

  • NDIS6.0/6.5 of Windows HLK tests use IPX/SPX protocol for send/receive in quite a few cases. There is no handshake or retransmits. Test keeps track of packet count and ordering.

© Copyright 2023, NVIDIA. Last updated on Nov 3, 2023.