Mellanox WinOF VPI Documentation v5.50.53000
Linux Kernel Upstream Release Notes v6.5

Introduction

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.

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.

Under <installation_directory>\Documentation:

  • License file

  • User Manual (this document)

  • MLNX_VPI_WinOF Release Notes

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).

© Copyright 2023, NVIDIA. Last updated on May 23, 2023.