NVIDIA Mellanox MCX623102AE-GDAT SmartNIC Firmware 22.31.1014

Firmware which is added at the time of manufacturing, is used to run user programs on the device and can be thought of as the software that allows hardware to run. Embedded firmware is used to control the functions of various hardware devices and systems, much like a computer’s operating system (OS) controls the function of software applications. Firmware may be written into read-only memory (ROM), erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM) or flash memory.

Important Notes:
- Security Hardening Enhancements: This release contains important reliability improvements and security hardening enhancements. Mellanox recommends upgrading your devices firmware to this release to improve the devices’ firmware security and reliability.
- SR-IOV - Virtual Functions (VF) per Port - The maximum Virtual Functions (VF) per port is 127.
- It is recommended to enable the “above 4G decoding” BIOS setting for features that require large amount of PCIe resources. Such features are: SR-IOV with numerous VFs, PCIe Emulated Switch, and Large BAR Requests.

Changes and New Features:

- Implemented a new NC-SI command get_debug_info to get mstdump via the NC-SI protocol to debug a device if the PCI link fails for any given reason.
- [Beta] Added support for SLRED grade register to provide grade criteria for the link.
- Phy counters are cleared x seconds after link is up. This feature can be configured and enabled via the ini fields using the NVconfig. The timeout to wait after the link is up before cleaning the counters is configured via NVconfig.
- Added support for Enabling/Disabling NIC and RDMA (port/partition) via the UEFI HII system settings. Note: Values set in this option only take effect when is Ethernet mode.
- Added support for a single PF per NUMA for Socket-Direct without a host management.
- Extended the Dynamic Flex Parser capabilities in order to support RTP packets parsing.
- Added support for full tunnel header matcher to VXLAN header (including VXLAN alert bit).
- Updated the NC-SI speed reporting output to support 200GbE speed. Now when running the NC-SI command, the output presents 200GbE speed as well.
- Increased the maximum number of MSIX per VF to 127. Note that increasing the number of MSIX per VF (NUM_VF_MSIX) affects the configured number of VFs (NUM_OF_VFS). The firmware may reduce the configured number of MSIX per VF and/or the number of VFs with respect to maximum number of MSIX vectors supported by the device (MAX_TOTAL_MSIX).
- NVME traffic can run now on another vHCA than the emulation manager vHCA. NVME SQ continues to be created on the emulation manager vHCA and an Alias object is created on the transport vHCA. The NVME SQ BE object is connected then to the Alias object with the QP provided. Note: With this change, the emulation manager capability for NVME is limited to only PF VHCA.
- Allows the device to be configured with more than 256 MSIX vectors per physical PCI function. Note: When using this feature while Sub-Function configuration (PF_BAR2_ENABLE / PER_PF_NUM_SF) is enabled, it is recommended to configure “above 4G-decoding” in the BIOS due to device BAR space requirements.
- Allows the device to be configured with a different number of MSIX vectors per physical PCI functions.
- Added a new bit ("data_in_order") to query the QP and allow a process/library to detect when the AR is enabled.
- Added a new flex parser to support GENEVE hardware offload and ICMP.
- When the non-page-supplier-FLR funcion is initiated, the firmware triggers a page event to the page supplier to indicate that all pages should be returned for the FLR function. Pages are returned by the driver to the kernel without issuing the MANAGE_PAGES commands to the firmare.
- Enabled measuring PCIe eye dynamic grading over PCIe Gen3 speed.
- Enabled hardware real time clock for virtualized environment.
- Added support for matching field ipv4_ihl in create_flow_group and set_flow_table_entry commands.

Bug Fixes:

- Fixed a fatal assert (0x8274) caused due to invalid inputs sent to the query_vport_state command. 
- Occasionally, toggling one of the NIC's port may result in link down of the 2nd port.
- The link is down when using multi-rates module supporting 100GBASE-SR4 or 25GBASE-SR speeds.
- Fixed a wrong indication of the function dependency in the SR-IOV capability in PCIe configuration space.
- Fixed a rare issue that caused the destroy DCT command not to work properly when there were packet drops on connect packets in the network.
- Fixed the rate select mechanism in QSFP modules.
- Fixed classification issues for "Passive" cables to be more robust. 
- Fixed an issue that caused a fatal error, and eventually resulted in the HCA hanging when a packet was larger than a strided receive WQE that was being scattered. 
- Fixed the resource number size (a 64 bit number) to avoid a scenario where it overwrote it with a 32 bit number and erased the high bits when de-allocating the resource number. In this scenario, when two resource numbers had identical low 32 bits, and because the high bits were cleared, it resulted in the same idx. Consequently, when two idxes were identical, then it freed the same idx twice. 
- Initialized the rate table in the static configuration so it will be configured at the link-not-up scenarios.
- CRT_DCR with index larger than 1 << 21 can collide with the CRT_SW_RESERVED address.
- Fixed an issue that caused the TX queue to hang when the VF rate limiter was set and it was leaded as NODNIC.
- "ICM-cache-large-scale" steering mode is not supported with NoDNIC boot.

About Network Adapter Drivers:

When connected, the operating system usually installs a generic driver that helps the computer to recognize the newly attached device.

However, proper software must be applied if you want to make use of all features that the network adapter has available. This task also allows computers to properly recognize all device characteristics such as manufacturer, chipset, technology, and others.

Updating the adapter's drivers and utilities version might improve overall performance and stability, increase transfer speeds, fix different compatibility problems and several network-related errors, as well as bring various other changes.

To install this release, simply get the package, extract it if necessary, run the setup, and follow the instructions displayed on-screen. When done, don't forget to perform a system restart and reconnect the network adapter to make sure that all changes take effect properly.

Without further ado, if you intend to apply this version, click the download button and install the package. Moreover, check with our website as often as possible so that you don't miss a single new release.