Mellanox Innova and Innova-2 FPGA-accelerated Ethernet adapters
A line of Mellanox SmartNICs from the late 2010s that paired a ConnectX Ethernet ASIC with an on-card FPGA to offload workloads such as IPsec and TLS encryption. The Innova Flex, Innova IPsec, and Innova-2 cards were sold from roughly 2017 until NVIDIA/Mellanox declared them end-of-life in 2019, citing low market interest and pointing customers at ConnectX-6 Dx instead.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting its niche: the hardware reached end-of-life across all Innova SKUs in 2019 with no direct replacement, and upstream already pruned the TLS and IPsec offload pieces in 2022 because those features were unmaintained and untested. The core FPGA support inside mlx5 is still exposed as CONFIG_MLX5_FPGA and saw occasional maintenance commits after 2021, so it should stay for the shrinking pool of legacy deployments, but a comment flagging its EOL status and the 2022 trimming would help future maintainers know it is on a slow glide path.
repository signals
sources
- kernel.googlesource.com
Upstream Kconfig still exposes CONFIG_MLX5_FPGA as 'Mellanox Technologies Innova support', so the code remains a supported in-tree hardware enablement path.
- network.nvidia.com
Mellanox announced EOL for Innova Flex EN adapters on February 17, 2019, with last-time-buy on February 17, 2019 and no replacement OPN.
- network.nvidia.com
Mellanox announced EOL for Innova IPsec EN adapters on November 10, 2019, recommending ConnectX-6 Dx EN as the product replacement rather than another Innova FPGA card.
- network.nvidia.com
Mellanox announced EOL for Innova-2 Flex/IPsec EN adapters on March 31, 2019 and states 'Low market interest' as the reason for termination.
- lists.openwall.net
There was upstream removal work for Innova IPsec support in 2022, showing the ecosystem was being trimmed because FPGA-specific offload pieces were obsolete.
- lkml.iu.edu
The 2022 TLS-removal cover letter says Innova TLS cards were EOL, unmaintained, untested, and not used by upstream/distro-oriented customers, but this targeted TLS support rather than the whole FPGA core.
- cateee.net
LKDDb still lists CONFIG_MLX5_FPGA through current kernel series, indicating the base Innova FPGA support remains present upstream.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local shell inspection showed this directory is built under CONFIG_MLX5_FPGA and implements Innova FPGA support inside mlx5_core, so it is a real hardware-facing driver slice, not just generic helpers. Local git log (shell) also showed non-removal touches after 2021 plus 2022 commits dropping only TLS/IPsec subfeatures. URLs were obtained via web search results: kernel.googlesource and LKDDb for current in-tree status, NVIDIA/Mellanox EOL PDFs for product lifecycle, and mailing-list archive pages for removal history. Conclusion: hardware is clearly obsolete in the market and likely only survives in legacy deployments, but the remaining core still has some upstream maintenance and no cited active series removing the whole fpga directory, so 'keep-annotate' fits better than deprecate/remove.