5. NVIDIA MLX5 RegEx Driver

Note

NVIDIA acquired Mellanox Technologies in 2020. The DPDK documentation and code might still include instances of or references to Mellanox trademarks (like BlueField and ConnectX) that are now NVIDIA trademarks.

The mlx5 RegEx (Regular Expression) driver library (librte_regex_mlx5) provides support for NVIDIA BlueField-2, and NVIDIA BlueField-3 families of 25/50/100/200 Gb/s adapters.

5.1. Design

This PMD is configuring the RegEx HW engine. For the PMD to work, the application must supply a precompiled rule file in rof2 format.

See NVIDIA MLX5 Common Driver guide for more design details.

5.2. Features

• Multi segments mbuf support.

5.3. Configuration

See mlx5 common compilation, mlx5 firmware configuration, and mlx5 common driver options.

5.4. Supported NICs

• NVIDIA® BlueField-2 SmartNIC
• NVIDIA® BlueField-3 SmartNIC

5.5. Prerequisites

• BlueField-2 or BlueField-3 running NVIDIA supported kernel.
• Enable the RegEx capabilities using system call from the BlueField-2 or BlueField-3.
• Official support is not yet released.

5.6. Limitations

• The firmware version must be greater than 24.31.0364 for BlueField-2 and 32.36.xxxx for BlueField-3.