NVIDIA Mellanox MCX623105AS-VDAT SmartNIC Firmware 22.30.1004

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:

- Enabled Precision Time Protocol (PTP) timestamp (UTC mode) in Multi-Host devices. 
- Added support for PAM4 Auto Negotiation and Link Training in 200GbE link speed.
- Removed triggering unexpected internal CNPs for RoCE Lossy slow_restart_idle feature.
- Enabled KR-Startup in Auto-Negotiation mode for PAM4.
- Added support for a new NV config mode “icm_cache_mode_large_scale_steering” that enables less cache misses and improves performance for cases when working with many steering rules. This capability is enabled using the mlxconfig parameter "ICM_CACHE_MODE".
- Added support for power saving in L1 ASPM link state. 
- Added support for Rx Link-Tuning in PAM4 Serdes speeds.
- This new capability allows the user to configure QoS (Rate Limit / BW share) between a network and the storage in a SmartNIC.
- This new capability adds an origin bit in the ctrl segment of the WQE sent by the Target to the Initiator during frontend controller exceptions in the NVMeoF interface. The WQE sent with the origin bit "set" will have SWQE_OPCODE_SEND_IMM opcode.
- Enabled connection tracking window validation by supporting CONN_TRACK_OFFLOAD general object and WQE with opcode ASO and opmode CONN_TRACK.
- Enabled TLS offload v1.3 with the key size of 256.
- This new capability enables VF/VF-group rate-limiting while per-host rate-limiter is also applied.
- Expanded the Sub-Function capability to support the scale of up to 512 by supporting more MSIX, removing internal obstacles and reducing the ICM memory footprint.
- This new capability enables asymmetric Sub-Function configuration. It expands the asymmetric Sub-Function configuration to support asymmetric configurations between all PFs, and provides Sub-Function scalability and asymmetric NV configurations.
- Added support for new steering match definer formats: Match definer format 26 and Match definer format 27
- Added support for matching the following flags: l3_ok, l4_ok, ipv4_checksum_ok, l4_checksum_ok bits in create_flow_group and set_flow_table_entry commands, as well as in match definer formats (formats 0,1,2 and 3) to be used in matching actions on the packet headers. 
- Added support for up to 500 virtio-net VFs for full emulation.

Bug Fixes:

- Rate limiter is currently not functional.
- Fixed an issue related to tap changes during link training. Now each tap is controlled independently.
- Fixed an issue that occasionally caused a failure in creating new SQs due to leakage in ref count.
- Set the cap to 0 for high index functions to avoid too many parallel VF NODNIC functions.
- Fixed an issue in the GTP extension of size 1 that prevented RSS Offloading from properly working. A new definition was added to skip the check of the next extension header = 0.
- SW steering rule insertion performance improvements.

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.