In this video I’m working with a Mellanox ConnectX-4 100Gb NIC (MCX455A) and walking through two things you’ll almost always want to do when you pick one of these up: update the firmware and switch the card from its default InfiniBand mode over to standard Ethernet. This is a PCIe 3.0 x16 card with a single QSFP28 port, and I’m planning to use it for regular Ethernet in upcoming homelab builds—so getting it into the right mode is step one. I show the exact NVIDIA/Mellanox resources I reference (getting started commands, MFT firmware tools, and the firmware download page), then I install the supporting packages I want on my Oracle Linux / RHEL-style system (kernel-devel, pciutils, and a couple others to avoid warnings and support IB tooling). From there it’s pretty straightforward: use mst to detect the adapter, flint to query the current firmware and burn the new image, reboot, and verify the updated version. Finally, I use mlxconfig to change LINK_TYPE_P1 from IB (mode 1) to Ethernet (mode 2), reboot again, and confirm the new Linux interface shows up—plus a quick look at the supported link modes up to 100Gb.