NVIDIA Mellanox MCX516A-GCAT SmartNIC Firmware 16.31.1014

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.
- When upgrading or changing the configuration on multi-host adapter cards, for the changes to take effect, PCIe restart must be simultaneously sent from both hosts (servers).
- 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:

- NIC scheduling feature support has been disabled for non-privileged functions.
- 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.
- Added support for Enabling/Disabling NIC and RDMA (port/partition) via the UEFI HII system settings.
- Increased the maximum number of MSIX per VF to 127.
- This feature allows the device to be configured with a different number of MSIX vectors per physical PCI functions.
- Added support for RDMA partitioning and RDMA counters in IB mode.
- 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.
- Enabled UID 0 to create resources with UMEM.
- Added support for receiving and sending native IB packets from/to the software (including all headers) via raw IBL2 QPs.
- Added support for RX RDMA NIC flow table on an IB port. Now the software can steer native IB packets to raw IB receive queues according to the DLID and the DQPN.

Bug Fixes:

- Fixed an issue that caused TX PRBS not to change after reconfiguring it. Now all PRBS mode are enabled in test mode.
- Fixed an assert that was caused when trying to open 1024 functions on the device. The maximum number of functions is 1023.
- Disabled the CNP counter “rp_cnp_ignored " (triggered by OOS (out-of-sequence)) when all ports are IB.
- Fixed the TMP421 sensor temperature reporting.
- Fixed the rate select mechanism in QSFP modules.
- Fixed classification issues for "Passive" cables to be more robust.
- Fixed an issue that occasionally caused some performance issues related to RC QPs using E2E-credits (not connected to SRQ and doing send/receive traffic) when the ROCE_ACCL tx_window was enabled.
- 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 a rare issue that caused RX pipe to hang.
- 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.
- 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.

About Wireless LAN Drivers:

Windows OSes usually apply a generic driver that allows systems to recognize the wireless component. However, in order to use all available features of this hardware, you must install the appropriate drivers.

Enabling the wireless card allows systems to read chipset information and manufacturer name, as well as connect to a network without using an Ethernet cable.

Updating the driver version can resolve different compatibility issues, fix related errors spotted throughout the product's usage, add support for new operating systems, improve transfer speed, as well as bring various other changes.

As for applying this release, the installation steps should not pose to much of a challenge since each producer intends to make the procedure as easy as possible: just download the package, run the setup, and follow the on-screen instructions.

Bear in mind that we do not recommend you install this release on OSes other than the specified ones even though other platforms might also be suitable. Also, when the update has finished, do perform a restart to ensure that all changes take effect properly.

Therefore, if you wish to apply this package, click the download button, and setup the wireless card on your system. Moreover, if you want to stay “updated one minute ago,” check with our website as often as possible.