User Manual

Mellanox InfiniBand OFED Driver for VMware® vSphere Overview
Rev 1.4.1-
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 IPoIB, SRP Initiator
y
Utilities
 Diagnostic tools
 Performance tests
y
Firmware tools (MFT)
y Documentation
1.4 mlx4 VPI Driver
mlx4 is the low level driver implementation for the ConnectX® and ConnectX®-2 adapters
designed by Mellanox Technologies. ConnectX/ConnectX-2 can operate as an InfiniBand adapter,
as an Ethernet NIC. The Mellanox OFED driver for VMware supports InfiniBand and Ethernet
NIC configurations. To accommodate the supported configurations, the driver is split into four
modules:
ib_basic
Handles low-level functions like device ini
tialization and firmware commands processing. Also
controls resource allocation so that the InfiniBand and Ethernet functions can share the device
without interfering with each other.
Handles InfiniBand-specific functions and plugs into the InfiniBand midlayer
mlx4_en
A 10GigE driver under drivers/net/mlx4 that handles Ethernet specific functions and plugs into the
netdev mid-layer
1.4.1 ULPs
IPoIB
The IP over IB (IPoIB) driver is a network interface implementation over InfiniBand. IPoIB
encapsulates IP datagrams over an InfiniBand connected or datagram transport service. IPoIB pre-
appends the IP datagrams with an encapsulation header, and sends the outcome over the
InfiniBand transport service. The interface supports unicast, multicast and broadcast. For details,
see Chapter 3.2, “IP over InfiniBand”.
SRP
SRP (SCSI RDMA Protocol) is designed to take full advantage of the protocol offload and RDMA
features provided by the InfiniBand architecture. SRP allows a large body of SCSI software to be
readily used on InfiniBand architecture. The SRP driver—known as the SRP Initiator—differs
from traditional low-level SCSI drivers in Linux. The SRP Initiator does not control a local HBA;
On VMware ESX Server, IPoIB supports Unreliable Datagram (UD) mode only, note
that Reliable Connected (RC) mode is not supported.
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