Firmware for Mellanox cards in Intel S2600JFQ

Infrastructure & Networking Adapters and Cables InfiniBand/VPI Adapter Cards
1

Hi,

I’m having a set of machines with Intel S2600JFQ motherboards which have Mellanox Infiniband cards (PSID: INCX-3I358C10501 ), Since I’m having RHEL/Centos 6.5 installed on my systems I’ve had to install the latest stack of the MLNX_OFED software, but it was always complaining about the firmware version of the cards (it is 2.11.1308). Theoretically the OFED stack requires something like 2.30.XXX. Despite that, things were working reasonably fine. Recently I’ve noticed that the same cards on S2600JFQs but slightly newer revisions (PSID: INCX-3I358C10551 ) have got a firmware update: Intel Intel . I was wondering whether I should expect maybe a firmware update for my cards as well, or all hope is lost ? Also it is interesting what people think about running recent OFED versions on slightly outdated firmware (because that seems to be the only alternative to actually updating firmware)

Thank you,

Sergey

2

Hi Sergey,

It is a bit odd that the firmware for the HCA PSID INCX-3I358C10551 was bumped up to 2.30.8000 and the FW for “501” wasn’t. If you have a support contract with Mellanox, then you should put in for a request to get this FW upgraded for the 501 cards. I’m assuming that a specific request came in to upgrade the 551 cards and there has been no request to upgrade FW for 501’s (no reference to Levis here). That being said, as Mellanox releases newer MLNX_OFED version, they of course test with the latest FW release (which is at 2.31.5050 at the time of this post) and back-test (i.e. regression tests) with older revisions, e.g. 2.30.8000, 2.30.3200, etc… but, only back to a certain point. 2.11.1308 is quite old so I’d doubt it was tested with the latest MLNX_OFED software stack. Hope this helps a bit? Thanks.

Branko.

3

Hi Branko,

Thanks for the answer. I think I only got the support contract for the switch from mellanox. The cards were provided as part of the intel system, so I don’t think I have specific mellanox support for them. But I’m asking now the vendor if they can nudge intel to nudge mellanox to provide the firmware…