NVIDIA MCX623106AC-CDA SmartNIC Firmware 22.39.1002

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:
- 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.
- Security Hardening Enhancements: This release contains important reliability improvements and security hardening enhancements. NVIDIA recommends upgrading your devices' firmware to this release to improve the devices’ firmware security and reliability.

Changes and New Features:

- Added a caching mechanism to improved expansion ROM performance and to avoid any slow boot occurrences when loading the expansion ROM driver.
- Added support for image size above 4GB when performing a live migration by splitting the image to chunks.
- Extended the role-based authentication to cover all crypto algorithms. Now the TLS. IPsec. MACsec. GCM, mem2mem, and NISP work when nv_crypto_conf.crypto_policy = CRYPTO_POLICY_FIPS_LEVEL_2, meaning all cryptographic engines can also work in wrapped mode and not only in plaintext mode.
- Programmable Congestion Control is now the default CC mechanism. ZTR_RTTCC is the default CC algorithm when ECE is enabled and the CC algorithm negotiation succeeds, otherwise PCC DCQCN will be used.
- Added new support for reserved mkey index range. When enabled, a range of mkey indexes is reserved for mkey by name use.

Bug Fixes:

- Modified the TCP IPv4 flows so that the steering TIR rx_hash_symmetric field is now valid only when both the SRC and DST fields are not set to zero.
- Added a locking mechanism to protect the firmware from a race condition between insertion and deletion of the same rule in parallel. Such behavior occasionally resulted in firmware accessing a memory that has already been released, thus causing IOMMU / translation error. Note: This fix will not impact insertion rate for tables owned by SW steering.
- Enabled live migration for virtio with mergeable buffer.
- Fixed an issue that resulted in migration data corruption when running parallel save_vhca_state/load_vhca_state commands on the same PF.

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.