NVIDIA Mellanox MCX516A-GCAT SmartNIC Firmware 16.21.1000

Changes and New Features:

- Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI v2): [Beta] The Coherent Accelerator Process Interface (CAPI) enables the user to attach a coherent accelerator to a Power and OpenPower based platforms. This solution delivers performance that exceeds today’s I/Oattached acceleration engines.
- NVME-oF Target Offload: Added support for NVMe over Fabrics (NVME-oF) offload, an implementation of the new NVME-oF standard target (server) side in hardware.
- Tag Matching RC/DC transport: Added support for Tag Matching Offload with RC/DC transport. In Tag Matching, the software holds a list of matching entries called matching list. Each matching entry contains a tag and a pointer to an application buffer. The matching list is used to steer arriving messages to a specific buffer according to the message tag. The action of traversing the matching list and finding the matching entry is called tag matching.
- Hairpin: [Beta] Hairpin enables ingress traffic on the network port to egress on the same port or the 2nd port of the adapter. Hairpin enables hardware forwarding of packets from the receive queue to the transmit queue, thus fully offloading software gateways to the hardware. The queues can be allocated on different PCI functions, thus enabling packets’ forwarding between different NIC ports.
- Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) Encapsulation Offloads over RDMA in SR-IOV: Added support for VXLAN encapsulation offloads over RDMA in SRIOV. Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) is a network virtualization technology that improves scalability problems associated with large cloud computing deployments. It tunnels Ethernet frames within Ethernet + IP + UDP frames.
- Flow Table Entries Enhancements: Enabled adapter support for up to 1 million Flow Table Entries.
- Hardware Accelerated 802.1ad VLAN (Q-in-Q Tunneling): Q-in-Q tunneling allows the user to create a Layer 2 Ethernet connection between two servers. The user can segregate a different VLAN traffic on a link or bundle different VLANs into a single VLAN.
- Memory Mapped to InterConnect (MEMIC): Added support for locked ICMC data buffer in order to improve latency by saving the PCI 'round trip'.
- QoS: Tx Rate Limiter: Added support for VF rate limiter and bandwidth share in ConnectX-5.
- Single PF for InfiniBand Dual Port Device: Added support for InfiniBand native (No SR-IOV) dual port device (Function per port is disabled). In this mode virtualization is not supported and ISSI = 0.
- Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN): Enabled ECN by default.
- RoCE Dual Port Mode (a.k.a MultiPort vHCA: MPV): Enables the usage of a dual port Virtual HCA (vHCA) to share RDMA resources (e.g., MR, CQ, SRQ, PDs) across the two Ethernet (RoCE) NIC network ports and display the NIC as a dual port device.
- DSCP: Added QPDPM register to support dynamic mapping between DSCP and priority. Added trust level for QoS prioritization according to the DSCP or PCP. Added ingress buffer management.
- Steering Rules Rate Improvement: Improved steering rules update rate to up to 50K rules per sec.
- Windows SR-IOV Enhanced eIPoIB: Enabled Windows SR-IOV Enhanced eIPoIB (without Secure Connection) for Windows-over-Windows setups.
- Driver CR Dump: crdump operation takes a snapshot of the device’s crspace dword-bydword. It enables the driver to collect debug information upon firmware failure.
- Secured Firmware Update: Secure Firmware Updates provides devices with the ability to verify digital signatures of new firmware binaries, in order to ensure that only officially approved versions are installed on the devices.
- Cables: Changed the default FEC mode for cables with attenuation 16 and below from RS to FC.
- ECN: Enabled ECN (CongestionControl) by default for all priorities on Ethernet ports.

Bug Fixes:

- Fixed an issue related to RDMA_CM driver that might have caused the QP Rate Limit to be activate unexpectedly and reduce the bandwidth significantly on this QP.
- Fixed an issue that caused low throughput when ECN was enabled in a many-toone scenario.
- Fixed an issue that caused ConnectX-5 Ex Virtual Function to be recognized as a ConnectX-5 Virtual Function device.
- Fixed an issue that wrongly reported the maximum temperature in a setup as the current temperature regardless of the actual temperature.
- PCI Gen4 receiver stability enhancements.
- Disabled the option to write to the protected modules to avoid receiving NACK upon module initialization.
- Enabled connecting 5m 40GbE cables to SwitchX, SwitchX-2 based switches.
- Fixed the issue where when using UD RoCE multicast traffic over SR-IOV, packets were scattered to all the attached QPs in the e-sw (PF and its VFs) and not only on the vport that was specified in the e-se FDB.

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.