NVIDIA Mellanox MCX623405AC-CDAN SmartNIC Firmware 22.32.2004

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.
- 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:

- Dynamic Fan Control: Dynamic Fan Control enables cooling down the card and modules by maintaining the minimal possible noise and power consumption.

Bug Fixes:

- Improved PCIe Rx margins.
- Fixed a rare case where asserts and ext_synd appeared in dmesg after performing driver restart.
- Changed the CTLE default configuration to support Gen4 servers. 
- Fixed an issue that caused ICMC trashing when ICMC cache hit low due to the high frequency of the DC garbage collection. 
- Enabled GTP-U matching (using the gtpu_dw_0, gtpu_dw_2 and gtpu_first_ext_dw_0 fields) when using firmware steering (flow group and flow table entry).
- Enabled delay drop for hairpin packets. If a hairpin QP is created with delay_drop_en enabled, the feature will be enabled across all GVMIs, based on the delay drop status.
- Fixed an issue that prevented the np_cnp_sent counter from increasing after it reached its maximum although there were CNPs sent upon receiving ECN-marked packets.
- Released all the global locks GVMI took during FLR to prevent a timeout failure in the next INIT_HCA process.

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.