NVIDIA Mellanox MCX653106A-ECAT SmartNIC Firmware 20.29.1016

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.
- When upgrading or changing configuration on multi-host adapter cards, for the changes to take effect, PCIe restart must be simultaneously send 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:

- [Beta] Added support for LinkX module burning via MFT toolset. The new capability enables direct firmware burning from the internal flash storage to reduce the bandwidth and accelerate the burning process, including burning several modules at a time.
- 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).
- Enabled the options to control different Tx sets for the same attribute when connecting a Mellanox-Mellanox vs Mellanox to 3rd party HCA.
- 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.
- 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.
- Enhanced IB Congestion Control to support lower minimum rate. Now it uses destination-lid to classify flows to handle larger scale, and achieve better results in GPCNeT benchmark.
- Hardware steering dump output used for debugging and troubleshooting.

Bug Fixes:

- 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 prevented VXLAN packets with svlan/cvlan tag from being matched.
- Fixed an issue that caused the eth_wqe_too_small counter to count ODP page faults.
- Fixed an issue related to raising 100GbE link on ConnectX-6 VPI 100Gb/s adapter cards.
- 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.
- Fixed an issue that resulted in low performance after enabling the RoCE Accelerator capability.
- 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.

  It is highly recommended to always use the most recent driver version available.

Try to set a system restore point before installing a device driver. This will help if you installed an incorrect or mismatched driver. Problems can arise when your hardware device is too old or not supported any longer.