Upgrading NIC firmware for vfio

[Timothée ZERBIB]

Dear Cloudlab Admins,

I am working on a project that requires Mellanox ConnectX-5 NICs with vfio
support to be able to run and compare with a paper from NSDI'24
(Junction: https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi24/presentation/fried).
As far as I can tell, the C6525 machines have the correct hardware, but
the firmware is too old to support vfio.

I can see that an update of the firmware of the same machines
has been requested by another user on december 2022,
(email "Upgrading NIC firmware"
https://groups.google.com/g/cloudlab-users/c/t1cMhJWmDc0/m/MxDabVbaAwAJ),
but the firmware version is still behind the one requested back then.

My questions are thus the following:
- Are you planning on upgrading the firmware on these machines and if yes,
  when can we expect this upgrade to happen?
- Are we allowed to change the firmware versions ourselves and if yes,
  are we supposed to set it back to its original version once done
  with the experiment?

Thank you in advance for answering my questions.

All the best,
Timothée