NVIDIA Mellanox MCX623432AC-ADAB SmartNIC Firmware 22.29.1016

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:

- [Beta] Eye-opening is supported only when using NRZ signal.
- Added the option to allow applications to build their own QoS tree over the NIC hierarchy by connecting QPs to responder/requestor Queue Groups.
- Improved NRZ link performance (RX algorithm).
- Improved NRZ link-up time (25G50G100G speeds).
- Added "InfiniBand" properties set to the Network Device Function Redfish object.
- Added support for Direct Packet Placement (DPP). DPP is a receive side transport service in which the Ethernet packets are scattered to the memory according to a packet sequence number (PSN) carried by the packet, and not by their arrival order. To enable DPP offload, the software should create a special RQ by using the CREATE_RQ command, and set DPP relevant attributes.
- Added trust level for VFs. Once the VF is trusted, it will get a set of trusted capabilities.
- Added support for error statistics and reporting for vDPA.
- Added support for IPv6 TSO offload.
- UCX can now enable AR by exposing Out-Of-Ordering bitmask per SL with "ooo_per_sl" field in the HCA_VPORT context. It can be also queried by running the QUERY_HCA_VPORT_CONTEXT command.
- Optimized vDPA performance for PPS in scalability of up to 127 devices per port.
- When using a Multi-Host device, the firmware can now discover who is the external SmartNIC host (the Embedded CPU PF (ECPF) ) with the highest index that is responsible for performing offload activities to the adapter card.
- Hardware steering dump output used for debugging and troubleshooting.

Bug Fixes:

- Fixed the issue that prevented "iperf3" from having traffic for virtio hardware offload solution in Windows.
- Fixed an issue that prevented "iperf3 -l 512" from having traffic for virtio hardware offload solution.
- Changed the default value of DCQCN's NP parameter min_time_between_cnps to 4 on all devices to support larger scalability of cluster.
- Fixed an issue that caused the struct virtio_net_hdr not to be set properly by the virtio hardware offload solution. The following message appeared in dmesg during traffic: "bad gso: type xx, size: xx".
- When MKEY_BY_NAME is enabled by NVCONFIG and a large number of VFs are configured, VM restart (VF/PF FLR) will take longer than when MKEY_BY_NAME is disabled.
- TCP/IP traffic received by the guest kernel with version higher than 4.10 is unstable because of corrupted GSO header. The following message can be seen from dmegs: "bad gso: type: xx, size: xxxx".
- Fixed an issue that resulted in low performance after enabling the RoCE Accelerator capability. The fix is available when all ports are set as Ethernet. 
- On rare cases, a fatal error related to errors from the PCI transport layer might be reported during FLR.

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.