User Manual
Rev 2.0-3.0.0
Mellanox Technologies
23
This tool burns a firmware binary image to the EEPROM(s) attached to an InfiniScaleIII® switch
device. It includes query functions to the burnt firmware image and to the binary image file. The tool
accesses the EEPROM and/or switch device via an I2C-compatible interface or via vendor-specific
MADs over the InfiniBand fabric (In-Band tool).
• Debug utilities
A set of debug utilities (e.g., itrace, mstdump, isw, and i2c)
For additional details, please refer to the MFT User’s Manual
docs/.
1.4 Quality of Service
Quality of Service (QoS) requirements stem from the realization of I/O consolidation over an IB
and Eth network. As multiple applications and ULPs share the same fabric, a means is needed to
control their use of network resources.
QoS over Mellanox OFED for Linux is discussed in Chapter 8, “OpenSM – Subnet Manager”.
1.5 RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)
RoCE allows InfiniBand (IB) transport applications to work over Ethernet network. RoCE
encapsulates the InfiniBand transport and the GRH headers in Ethernet packets bearing a dedi-
cated ether type (0x8195). Thus, any VERB application that works in an InfiniBand fabric can
work in an Ethernet fabric as well.
RoCE is enabled only for drivers that support VPI (currently, only mlx4). When working with
RDMA applications over Ethernet link layer the following points should be noted:
• The presence of a Subnet Manager (SM) is not required in the fabric. Thus, operations
that require communication with the SM are managed in a different way in RoCE. This
does not affect the API but only the actions such as joining multicast group, that need to
be taken when using the API
• Since LID is a layer 2 attribute of the InfiniBand protocol stack, it is not set for a port
and is displayed as zero when querying the port
• With RoCE, the alternate path is not set for RC QP and therefore APM is not supported
• Since the SM is not present, querying a path is impossible. Therefore, the path record
structure must be filled with the relevant values before establishing a connection.
Hence, it is recommended working with RDMA-CM to establish a connection as it
takes care of filling the path record structure
• The GID table for each port is populated with N+1 entries where N (N>=0) is the num-
ber of VLAN devices over this port.