OpenSolaris

Heads-up: CR 6589114 ConnectX InfiniBand Support

Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:46:44 -0700
From: Bill Taylor <Bill.Taylor at sun dot com>
To: onnv-gate at onnv dot eng dot sun dot com, on-all at eng dot sun dot com
Subject: Heads-up: CR 6589114 ConnectX InfiniBand Support

Putback of the following:

         PSARC/2008/497  hermon hca driver
         CR 6589114 Need Solaris Driver for Mellanox hermon (ConnectX) HCA

adds support for the 4th generation HCAs from Mellanox to Nevada.  These
HCAs are marketed by Mellanox under the name "ConnectX", code-named hermon.
These HCAs are capable of high bandwidth and lower latency than previous HCA
products have been.  All InfiniBand ULPs that have already been integrated
will run on this HCA and driver.

The presence of the driver can be verified by running:

# modinfo | grep hermon
237 7ae00000  70d68 285   1  hermon (ConnectX ib HCA Driver)

The newer HCAs like hermon run on the PCIe bus, utilizing a 8x or larger
physical connector.  Some systems have slots that are 8x physically but
only 4x electrically (meaning the PCIe slot has half the bandwidth of an
8x slot), so for best performance the HCA should be installed in an
electrically 8x slot.

They also use system (host) memory for storing chip-utilized context
information, firmware cache, and other similar things - this is unlike
the support of previously integrated HCAs (tavor driver) which used
memory that was local to the HCA adapter.  Each HCA may utilize up to
approx 110 MB of memory for such storage, at its maximum support of
QPs and CQs.

CRs against the hermon should be reported against solaris/ib_sw/hermon.

Support and discussion of IB topics in general can be directed to
     infiniband-interest at sun dot com
Support and discussion of hermon driver issues can be directed to
     ibhca-dev at sun dot com

~-- Hermon/HCA Development Team