InfiniBand bridging in BlueField-2

Infrastructure & Networking BlueField
1

I have a simple question.

Can I use BlueField-2 to bridge InfiniBand traffic between Host and ARM when operating in Embedded Mode?

If not, what is the main benefit of using BF-2 in InfiniBand with Embedded Mode?

2

Hi Jongwook,

​Do you mean you want to set BlueField-2 as ECPF mode (Embedded CPU Function Ownership Mode (SmartNIC Mode)) ?

Simple answer for your question is Yes.

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Here is more information below:​

Currently, BlueField-2 DPU supports configuring network ports as either Ethernet only or InfiniBand only.

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In ECPF mode, the NIC resources and functionality are owned and controlled by the embedded Arm subsystem. A network function is still exposed to the host.

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There are two ways to pass traffic to the host interface:

1)Either using representors to forward traffic to the host (every packet to/from the host would be handled also by the network interface on the embedded Arm side),

2)or push rules to the embedded switch which allows and offloads this traffic.

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Regards,​

Levei