NVIDIA/Mellanox ConnectX and BlueField mlx5 InfiniBand and RDMA adapters
RDMA support for NVIDIA (formerly Mellanox) ConnectX-4 through ConnectX-7 network adapters and BlueField data processing units, providing InfiniBand and RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) connectivity at 25 to 400 Gbps. These cards are the dominant high-speed fabric in modern AI training clusters, HPC systems, hyperscale clouds, and enterprise storage networks.
recommendation
It should stay because this is one of the most actively maintained networking subsystems in the kernel, with hundreds of commits from dozens of contributors over the past five years. NVIDIA continues to sell and ship new ConnectX-7 and BlueField hardware in 2025, with fresh firmware releases as recent as October 2025, so the driver underpins a large and growing share of AI and cloud infrastructure.
repository signals
sources
- nvidia.com
NVIDIA actively markets current ConnectX NICs, including ConnectX-6 Dx and ConnectX-7, for cloud, AI, storage, and enterprise deployments.
- docs.nvidia.com
The current ConnectX-7 user manual describes shipping InfiniBand and Ethernet adapter cards, showing the mlx5 family remains an active product line.
- docs.nvidia.com
October 2025 GA firmware release notes list supported ConnectX-7 products and protocols, indicating active 2025 support and availability.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Recommendation is keep: the supplied static history already shows strong ongoing upstream maintenance for this directory (349 substantive commits in 5y, 69 authors, most recent substantive touch 2026-02-09), which is inconsistent with deprecation. lore_subsystem_churn was queried on the directory prefix via MCP and returned zero sampled patches, but this appears to be a lore path-coverage blind spot for the directory rather than evidence of inactivity; a fallback lei lore query via shell could not run because the sandbox blocked lei-daemon socket startup. The cited NVIDIA URLs were obtained by web search and show the mlx5 hardware family is still sold and documented in 2025, so there is no natural replacement driver and no obsolescence signal here.