SoftRoCE on 1 or 2 Linux Ubuntu workstations without Mellanox NIC

Infrastructure & Networking Software And Drivers WinOF Driver
1

I have been doing RDMA on 2 Windows workstation with 2 Mellanox ConnectX-6 NIC. The NIC card were temporarily on a short term loan to my colleagues due to business priority. While I am waiting. I would like to know if:

  1. Can I continue my work using SoftRoCE on 2 Lunix/Ubuntu computers (or self-loopback using 1 Ubuntu computer) without any (zero) physical Rdma-capable NIC?
  2. Does SoftRoCE runs on Windows OS as of 2023, using 1 or 2 Mellanox NIC?
    Thank you.
2

Hello @user58403,

Thank you for posting your query on our portal. To answer your questions regarding SoftRoCE,

  1. Yes, you can continue your work using SoftRoCE without any physical RDMA-capable NICs. Soft-RoCE is a software implementation of RoCE that allows RoCE to run on any Ethernet network adapter whether it offers hardware acceleration or not. Soft-RoCE is released as part of upstream kernel 4.8 (or above). Mellanox OFED 4.0 or upstream driver could be used. If you install MLNX_OFED 4.0, you automatically get the Soft-RoCE kernel module and user space libraries.

  2. SoftRoCE is a feature that was primarily developed for Linux distributions. It is currently not supported on Windows.

Hope this anwers your questions.

Regards,
Bhargavi

3

Thank you very much for the prompt, concise and very clear reply. Really appreciated.