MLNX_EN Linux Driver – Linux Driver for ConnectX EN Based Network Interface Cards with 10GigE Support
Overview
Mellanox offers a robust and full set of protocol software and driver for Linux with the ConnectX EN NIC with Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet support. Designed to provide a robust, high performance support for Enhanced Ethernet with fabric consolidation over FC SAN and TCP/IP based LAN applications. The driver and software in conjunction with the Industry’s first PCI-E Gen 2 based ConnectX EN single/dual port 10GbE adapters achieves full line rate, full duplex 10Gbps performance per port, FCoE is implemented with full hardware offload of FC exchanges and FC-CRC calculation.
BENEFITS
- High performance single/Dual port support with full line rate, full duplex 10Gbps per port
- Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) Initiator support with complete hardware offload of FC exchanges (SCSI operations) and FC-CRC calculation.
- FCoE feature allows the driver to connect to FC target on an FC Fabric using an FCoE capable Switch or Gateway
- Support of full hardware offload of FC exchanges improves bandwidth and IO transactions in a FC Fabric
- Provides future proofing the storage, network, and cluster needs with Converged Enhanced Ethernet support on a single wire Supports TCP/IP stateless offload (LSO, LRO and RSS), and Hardware Checksum Offload for Tx and Rx packets.
- Supports up to 16 Tx and Rx queues per port, 2 Rx steering modes including Receive core Affinity or VLAN user – priority, 2 Tx arbitration modes
- Provides Net device statistics per port with both ports in active modeSupports extensive VLAN support with VLAN Tx/Rx acceleration (HW VLAN stripping/insertion), HW VLAN filtering and HW multicast filtering
- Supports adaptive Interrupt moderation on the receive path patterned according to either latency-bound traffic or bandwidth bound traffic.
- Default NAPI support is enabled per-core to run in interrupt mode or polling mode based on interrupt load
- Performance optimization support with “ethtool” command; Allows tuning of various NIC driver options
- Support server and IO consolidation with high-performance, low CPU utilization
- Use fewer high-performance systems in a rack based system, reducing cabling, low power consumption
- Supports all major Linux Distributions
