NVIDIA Mellanox MCX623405AN-CDAN SmartNIC Firmware 22.27.1016

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.

Changes and New Features:

- RoCE Selective Repeat introduces a new QP retransmission mode in RoCE: recovery from packet drop by resending the dropped packet and not only all the PSN window (Go-Back-N protocol),
- Allows BMC to query and control NIC over RedFish API. Currently, the NIC supports reading data and setting basic Ethernet and InfiniBand parameters.
- Enables matching of source_vhca_port in the FDB flow for ECMP hardware offload on a single FDB.
- [Beta] Enables the user to reset the firmware without resetting the PHY. The links that were up will stay up, all the other links will be disabled.
- Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) offload allows the NIC to accelerate IPsec AES-GCM 128/256. The hardware will encrypt/decrypt the packet and send it to wire/host accordingly.
- [Beta] Added support for vDPA (VirtIO 0.95 and 1.0).
- [Beta] Added support for live migration on vDPA (VirtIO 0.95 and 1.0).
- Added support for dumping hardware steering entries (raw data) using the resource dump API.
- 100GbE link speed is supported in Auto-Negotiation Mode.
- 200GbE link speed is supported in Force Mode.
- [Beta] RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) is a mechanism to provide this efficient data transfer with very low latencies on lossless Ethernet networks.
- [Beta] Added support for Relaxed Ordering Read using the create_mkey flag.
- Enabled traffic directly from OS to BMC and backwards through NIC.
- Enabled the NCSI management protocol over RMII interface.
- Opened additional sensors for all Facebook adapter cards.
- Added support for configuring Virtual Output Queuing (VoQ).
- Added support for expansion ROM for UEFI and PXE.
- Enabled the hardware to identify and mark congestion.
- A “Secure firmware update” is the ability of a device to verify digital signatures of new firmware binaries, in order to assure that only officially approved versions can be installed from the host, the network or a Board Management Controller (BMC).
- Enables the counters to expose any legacy mode debuggability information.

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.