Rivermax NIC requirement on RTX 5080 workstation and Jetson AGX Thor

Infrastructure & Networking BlueField
1

Hi NVIDIA team,

First, thank you for granting the Rivermax development license and for the support so far — it’s much appreciated.

I’m doing academic research on object tracking and segmentation. As part of the pipeline I need to receive a high-bandwidth video stream (~8 Gb/s, over fiber or RJ45) with kernel bypass and move the payloads directly into GPU memory via GPUDirect (zero-copy), so I maximize GPU utilization during ingest and keep the CPU out of the data path. I have two target platforms:

  1. An x86_64 workstation with an RTX 5080 (Linux).
  2. A Jetson AGX Thor Developer Kit (T5000, JetPack 7.x, Ubuntu 24.04, kernel 6.8-tegra) for edge deployment.

From the Rivermax adapter selection guidelines I understand Rivermax only binds to supported ConnectX-6 Lx/Dx, ConnectX-7, or BlueField-3 adapters. Neither machine currently has one:

  • On the 5080 workstation, lspci shows only a Realtek 2.5GbE controller and a MediaTek Wi-Fi adapter.
  • On Thor, the QSFP28 (4x25GbE) interfaces use the nvethernet (6.8.12-tegra) driver and the RJ45 is a Realtek RTL8126 — neither is a ConnectX ASIC.

My questions:

  1. RTX 5080 workstation: To use Rivermax here, do I simply need to install a supported ConnectX NIC (e.g. ConnectX-6 Lx, 2x25GbE) into a free PCIe slot? For ~8 Gb/s, is a single ConnectX-6 Lx (PCIe 4.0 x8) sufficient? I also read that on Linux GPUDirect works on all GPUs — can you confirm it works with the RTX 5080 on Linux?
  2. Jetson AGX Thor: Is there any supported way to run Rivermax on Thor? Since its integrated networking is not ConnectX, is it feasible to attach a ConnectX-6/7 add-in card via an M.2-to-PCIe adapter, and do the DOCA-OFED / mlx5 drivers build and load on the JetPack 7.x Tegra (aarch64) kernel? Is Rivermax validated in that configuration?
  3. If Rivermax is not viable on Thor, then what would be recommended as an alternative path for kernel-bypass-to-GPU?

Thanks again for the support.

2

Hi,

Rivermax is only supported with NVIDIA networking adapters.

  1. ConnectX-6 Lx 2x25G can support 8Gbps stream of SFP port. GPUDirect is also supported.
  2. The Jatson AGX Thor doesn’t have a PCIe slot extension so adding a PCIe adapter is not an option – if you need horse power the DGX Spark might be an option for you
3

Hi thank you so much for the quick answer. It’s been really helpful. Just to close the loop on the Thor side: since a PCIe add-in adapter isn’t an option here, would the recommended kernel-bypass-to-GPU path for edge deployment be Holoscan’s Advanced Network Operator / GPUDirect RDMA over the integrated QSFP28?