Thursday 13 July 2017

Mellanox PPC SwitchX Update v3.6.4006

Mellanox has released a firmware update for their SwitchX switches: v3.6.4006.

We've already updated our two SX1012 switches to v3.6.3508 as per our blog post Mellanox Prep for RoCE RDMA. That means that we'll be able to upgrade without any intermediary steps as per the section Upgrade From Previous Versions.

When looking into the Release Notes for the new firmware version we see:


Note that in our case we are running ConnectX-3 Pro ( MCX354A) adapters. So, we'll be keeping firmware 2.4.5030 on those NICs until such time as Mellanox lets us know that we are able to bump them up to 2.4.7000.


Looking in the Changes and New Features section there doesn't seem to be anything specific to us however there are quite a few items listed for versions between v3.6.3508 and v3.6.4006!

There are a few items in the General Known Issues section that we need to be aware of.
  • Point 32: Statistics files are reset which means graphs get reset.
  • Point 49 indicates that a faulty cable may cause other ports to delay their "rise". 
  • Point 50 is important. 40GbE passive copper cables 5m in length may experience "rise" issues if connected to a third party 40GbE NIC.
  • Point 93: Break-out Cables
    • Odd ports might suffer from Tx drops even when global flow control is enabled.
      Set the egress poll to 8M using the following command:
      “pool ePool0 direction egress-mc size 8M type dynamic”.
  •  Point 128: QoS: ETS does not work on SN2100 switch system.
I suggest checking out the Bug Fixes section near the end of the document. ;)

Philip Elder
Microsoft High Availability MVP
MPECS Inc.
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
Our Cloud Service
Twitter: @MPECSInc

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