User Manual

Rev 2.1-1.0.6

Mellanox Technologies

• The mlx4 ipoib driver when it attaches its QP to his configured GIDS

Fragmented UDP traffic cannot be steered. It is treated as 'other' protocol by hardware

(from the first packet) and not considered as UDP traffic.

4.13 Single Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV)

Single Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV) is a technology that allows a physical PCIe device to

present itself multiple times through the PCIe bus. This technology enables multiple virtual

instances of the device with separate resources. Mellanox adapters are capable of exposing in

ConnectX®-3 adapter cards 63 virtual instances called Virtual Functions (VFs). These virtual

functions can then be provisioned separately. Each VF can be seen as an addition device con-

nected to the Physical Function. It shares the same resources with the Physical Function, and its

number of ports equals those of the Physical Function.

SR-IOV is commonly used in conjunction with an SR-IOV enabled hypervisor to provide virtual

machines direct hardware access to network resources hence increasing its performance.

In this chapter we will demonstrate setup and configuration of SR-IOV in a Red Hat Linux envi-

ronment using Mellanox ConnectX® VPI adapter cards family.

4.13.1 System Requirements

To set up an SR-IOV environment, the following is required:

• MLNX_OFED Driver

• A server/blade with an SR-IOV-capable motherboard BIOS

• Hypervisor that supports SR-IOV such as: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Version 6.*

• Mellanox ConnectX® VPI Adapter Card family with SR-IOV capability

4.13.2 Setting Up SR-IOV

Depending on your system, perform the steps below to set up your BIOS. The figures used in this

section are for illustration purposes only. For further information, please refer to the appropriate

BIOS User Manual:

We recommend using libibverbs v2.0-3.0.0 and libmlx4 v2.0-3.0.0 and higher as

of MLNX_OFED v2.0-3.0.0 due to API changes.