NVIDIA Connect X-7 NIC with mlx5 driver detects MFA1A00 cable as a 100G-KR4 cable incorrectly. CX6/CX4 detects it as 100G-SR correctly

N

Nirmalanand Jebakumar

Hello there,

I am running FreeBSD 14.2 with a NVIDIA Connect X-7 NIC. The mlx5(3.7.1) driver that comes along with the base kernel image detects MFA1A00 cable as a 100G-KR4 cable incorrectly.
But the earlier generation of its NIC, Connect X-6/Connect X-4 detects it correctly as a 100G-SR4 cable.
Raised an enterprise support case with NVIDIA and they replied mentioning that the mlx5 driver on FreeBSD is developed and maintained by the FreeBSD community and asked me to reach out here.

I brought up Ubuntu 24.X on the same system and with the same firmware version the base PF driver detects the cable as a 100G-SR4 cable as expected.
There could be some patch that might be missing between the Linux mlx5 driver and the FreeBSD mlx5 driver in this area.

Is there a plan to bridge those differences some time soon?
Cable image is attached for reference.

Regards,
Nirmal
 

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Upon a quick scan of the Linux mlx5 driver, the connector_type from PTYS seem to reflect an accurate value from the hardware.

Following patch[and any incremental patches in this area as required] might have to be leveraged for freebsd under mlx5e_update_carrier() in mlx5_en_main.c:
github.com

net/mlx5e: Add support for reading connector type from PTYS · torvalds/linux@5b4793f

Read port connector type from the firmware instead of caching it in the driver metadata. Signed-off-by: Eran Ben Elisha <eranbe@mellanox.com> Signed-off-by: Saeed Mahameed <saeedm@mellano...
github.com github.com

MLX5_GET(ptys_reg, out, connector_type);
Adding this solved my problem.

Request the experts in the community to work on the official mlx5 driver patch for FreeBSD.
 
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