NVIDIA Mellanox MCX654106A-ECAT SmartNIC Firmware 20.31.1014

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:

- 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.
- Updated the NC-SI speed reporting output to support 200GbE speed. Now when running the NC-SI command, the output presents 200GbE speed as well.
- 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 measuring PCIe eye dynamic grading over PCIe Gen3 speed.
- 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.
- Added support for matching field ipv4_ihl in create_flow_group and set_flow_table_entry commands.

Bug Fixes:

 
- Disabled the CNP counter “rp_cnp_ignored " (triggered by OOS (out-of-sequence)) when all ports are IB.
- Improved PortXmitWait IB counter accuracy.
- 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.
- In InfiniBand non-virtualization system, due to a corrupted steering root, traffic fails after a warm reboot.

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.