VPI Driver

Home » Products » Adapter IB/VPI SW MLNXOFED: Firmware - Driver Compatibility Matrix Below is a list of the recommend MLNXOFED driver / firmware sets for Mellanox products.

Drivers filed under: Mellanox ConnectX-4 Adapter Card Firmware (76 items). Mellanox MCX455A-FCAT VPI Card Firmware 19 downloads. Network Card Mellanox. Linux. Base Driver for Intel(R) Ethernet Adaptive Virtual Function; Linux. Base Driver for the Intel(R) Ethernet Connection E800 Series; Linux kernel driver for Compute Engine Virtual Ethernet (gve): Mellanox ConnectX(R) mlx5 core VPI Network Driver. Contents; Enabling the driver and kconfig options; Devlink info; Devlink health reporters. Buy online from VPI: VGA monitor extension cable, USB KVM cable, CAT5 patch cord, USB Hub Splitter Switch.

Contents¶

Enabling the driver and kconfig options¶

mlx5 core is modular and most of the major mlx5 core driver features can be selected (compiled in/out)

Basic features, ethernet net device rx/tx offloads and XDP, are available with the most basic flags

For the list of advanced features please see below.

CONFIG_MLX5_CORE=(y/m/n) (module mlx5_core.ko)

The driver can be enabled by choosing CONFIG_MLX5_CORE=y/m in kernel config.

This will provide mlx5 core driver for mlx5 ulps to interface with (mlx5e, mlx5_ib).

CONFIG_MLX5_CORE_EN=(y/n)

Choosing this option will allow basic ethernet netdevice support with all of the standard rx/tx offloads.

mlx5e is the mlx5 ulp driver which provides netdevice kernel interface, when chosen, mlx5e will be

CONFIG_MLX5_EN_ARFS=(y/n)

Enables Hardware-accelerated receive flow steering (arfs) support, and ntuple filtering.

CONFIG_MLX5_EN_RXNFC=(y/n)

Enables ethtool receive network flow classification, which allows user defined

flow rules to direct traffic into arbitrary rx queue via ethtool set/get_rxnfc API.

CONFIG_MLX5_CORE_EN_DCB=(y/n):

CONFIG_MLX5_MPFS=(y/n)

Ethernet Multi-Physical Function Switch (MPFS) support in ConnectX NIC.

MPFs is required for when Multi-Host configuration is enabled to allow passing

user configured unicast MAC addresses to the requesting PF.

CONFIG_MLX5_ESWITCH=(y/n)

Ethernet SRIOV E-Switch support in ConnectX NIC. E-Switch provides internal SRIOV packet steering

and switching for the enabled VFs and PF in two available modes:

1) Legacy SRIOV mode (L2 mac vlan steering based).

CONFIG_MLX5_CORE_IPOIB=(y/n)

Requires CONFIG_MLX5_CORE_EN to provide an accelerated interface for the rdma

CONFIG_MLX5_FPGA=(y/n)

Build support for the Innova family of network cards by Mellanox Technologies.

Innova network cards are comprised of a ConnectX chip and an FPGA chip on one board.

If you select this option, the mlx5_core driver will include the Innova FPGA core and allow

CONFIG_MLX5_EN_IPSEC=(y/n)

Enables IPSec XFRM cryptography-offload accelaration.

CONFIG_MLX5_EN_TLS=(y/n)

CONFIG_MLX5_INFINIBAND=(y/n/m) (module mlx5_ib.ko)

Provides low-level InfiniBand/RDMA and RoCE support.

External options ( Choose if the corresponding mlx5 feature is required )

CONFIG_PTP_1588_CLOCK: When chosen, mlx5 ptp support will be enabled
CONFIG_VXLAN: When chosen, mlx5 vxlan support will be enabled.
CONFIG_MLXFW: When chosen, mlx5 firmware flashing support will be enabled (via devlink and ethtool).

Devlink info¶

The devlink info reports the running and stored firmware versions on device.It also prints the device PSID which represents the HCA board type ID.

User command example:

Devlink parameters¶

flow_steering_mode: Device flow steering mode¶

The flow steering mode parameter controls the flow steering mode of the driver.Two modes are supported:1. ‘dmfs’ - Device managed flow steering.2. ‘smfs - Software/Driver managed flow steering.

In DMFS mode, the HW steering entities are created and managed through theFirmware.In SMFS mode, the HW steering entities are created and managed though bythe driver directly into Hardware without firmware intervention.

SMFS mode is faster and provides better rule inserstion rate compared to default DMFS mode.

User command examples:

Set SMFS flow steering mode:
Read device flow steering mode:

enable_roce: RoCE enablement state¶

RoCE enablement state controls driver support for RoCE traffic.When RoCE is disabled, there is no gid table, only raw ethernet QPs are supported and traffic on the well known UDP RoCE port is handled as raw ethernet traffic.

To change RoCE enablement state a user must change the driverinit cmode value and run devlink reload.

User command examples:

Disable RoCE:
Read RoCE enablement state:

Devlink health reporters¶

tx reporter¶

The tx reporter is responsible for reporting and recovering of the following two error scenarios:

TX timeout
Report on kernel tx timeout detection.Recover by searching lost interrupts.
TX error completion
Report on error tx completion.Recover by flushing the TX queue and reset it.

TX reporter also support on demand diagnose callback, on which it providesreal time information of its send queues status.

User commands examples:

Diagnose send queues status:

NOTE: This command has valid output only when interface is up, otherwise the command has empty output.

Show number of tx errors indicated, number of recover flows ended successfully,is autorecover enabled and graceful period from last recover:

rx reporter¶

The rx reporter is responsible for reporting and recovering of the following two error scenarios:

RX queues initialization (population) timeout
RX queues descriptors population on ring initialization is done innapi context via triggering an irq, in case of a failure to getthe minimum amount of descriptors, a timeout would occur and itcould be recoverable by polling the EQ (Event Queue).
RX completions with errors (reported by HW on interrupt context)
Report on rx completion error.Recover (if needed) by flushing the related queue and reset it.

RX reporter also supports on demand diagnose callback, on which itprovides real time information of its receive queues status.

Diagnose rx queues status, and corresponding completion queue:

NOTE: This command has valid output only when interface is up, otherwise the command has empty output.

Show number of rx errors indicated, number of recover flows ended successfully,is autorecover enabled and graceful period from last recover:

fw reporter¶

The fw reporter implements diagnose and dump callbacks.It follows symptoms of fw error such as fw syndrome by triggeringfw core dump and storing it into the dump buffer.The fw reporter diagnose command can be triggered any time by the user to checkcurrent fw status.

User commands examples:

Check fw heath status:
Read FW core dump if already stored or trigger new one:

NOTE: This command can run only on the PF which has fw tracer ownership,running it on other PF or any VF will return “Operation not permitted”.

fw fatal reporter¶

The fw fatal reporter implements dump and recover callbacks.It follows fatal errors indications by CR-space dump and recover flow.The CR-space dump uses vsc interface which is valid even if the FW commandinterface is not functional, which is the case in most FW fatal errors.The recover function runs recover flow which reloads the driver and triggers fwreset if needed.

User commands examples:

Run fw recover flow manually:
Read FW CR-space dump if already strored or trigger new one:

NOTE: This command can run only on PF.

mlx5 tracepoints¶

mlx5 driver provides internal trace points for tracking and debugging usingkernel tracepoints interfaces (refer to ftrace - Function Tracer).

For the list of support mlx5 events check /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events/mlx5/

tc and eswitch offloads tracepoints:

Vpi Driver Updater

mlx5e_configure_flower: trace flower filter actions and cookies offloaded to mlx5:
mlx5e_delete_flower: trace flower filter actions and cookies deleted from mlx5:
mlx5e_stats_flower: trace flower stats request:
mlx5e_tc_update_neigh_used_value: trace tunnel rule neigh update value offloaded to mlx5:
mlx5e_rep_neigh_update: trace neigh update tasks scheduled due to neigh state change events: