SDSC "mlnx-ofed" roll

Overview

This roll bundles the Mellanox® OFED Linux distribution for installation on a Rocks® cluster.

IMPORTANT NOTE

The Mellanox OFED Linux software must be obtained from Mellanox® directly as this roll only wraps the software into a Rocks® roll for installation into a Rocks® cluster.

For more information about the various packages included in the Mellanox OFED Linux software stack and to download the MLNX_OFED_LINUX software archive for your system please visit their official web pages:

Mellanox OFED Linux (MLNX_OFED)

Requirements

To build/install this roll you must have root access to a Rocks® development machine (e.g., a frontend or development appliance).

If your Rocks development machine does not have Internet access you must download the appropriate MLNX_OFED_LINUX source file(s) using a machine that does have Internet access and copy them into the src/mlnx-ofed-linux directory on your Rocks development machine.

Dependencies

This roll wraps up the basic Mellanox OFED Linux installation process into a Rocks® roll which can be used to install all nodes in a cluster. Part of this process includes building kernel modules for the running kernel and adding the produced RPMs to the roll. Otherwise, binary RPMs provided by Mellanox are added unchanged to the roll.

To build updated kernel modules the following packages are required on the host building the roll...

perl
pciutils
python
gcc-gfortran
libxml2-python
tcsh
libnl.i686
libnl
expat
glib2
tcl
libstdc++
bc
tk
gtk2
atk
cairo
numactl
pkgconfig
ethtool

These RPMs are generally included on Rocks® frontend and development servers.

NOTE: The roll build process will UNINSTALL all Mellanox OFED Linux RPMs from the build server during the roll build. DO NOT build this roll on a frontend which is acting as your subnet manager.

Alternate Versions of MLNX_OFED_LINUX

This roll is used to build the Mellanox OFED Linux stack that is in production on SDSC HPC systems. As such, specific versions of MLNX_OFED_LINUX sources that support our installed hardware and target OS are used in the build process.

If your hardware or OS require a different version of MLNX_OFED_LINUX it is straightforward to change the roll to build that version.

Follow these steps...

Identify the version of MLNX_OFED_LINUX you would like to build/install on your system
Download the tgz version of the MLNX_OFED_LINUX software stack and place in the src/mlnx-ofed-linux directory
Generate an updated entry for the binary_hashes file in the src/mlnx-ofed-linux directory using this script.

For example...

% cd src/mlnx-ofed-linux
% curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sdsc/skeleton-roll/master/gen_hash.sh
% sh ./gen_hash.sh MLNX_OFED_LINUX-*.tgz | tee -a binary_hashes
    252193073  84799d79649f745b8ecb7e1031ab3f42602f626b  MLNX_OFED_LINUX-4.6-1.0.1.1-rhel7.6-x86_64.tgz

Modify the version.mk file in the src/mlnx-ofed-linux directory as/if necessary
Modify the .mlnx file in the src/mlnx-ofed-linux directory as/if necessary
Modify the version.mk file at the root of the repository as/if necessary. The utility scripts, kern.sh and mlnx.sh can be used to obtain the correct values to use for the ROLLNAME makefile variable.

Conflicts with OS Provided Infiniband RPMs

It is common to update a Rocks system using the mlnx-ofed-roll to a newer version of CentOS and/or apply system updates using an Updates-CentOS roll.

In either of these cases it is possible to create a conflict between distro provided Infiniband RPMs and those included by the MLNX_OFED_LINUX version provided by a specific build of this roll source.

Any other roll providing Infiniband related RPMs can create a similar conflict.

An example of this conflict and it's resolution can be found in the CONFLICTS.md file in this repository.

Building

To build the mlnx-ofed-roll, execute these instructions on a Rocks development machine (e.g., a frontend or development appliance):

% make default 2>&1 | tee build.log
% grep "RPM build error" build.log

If nothing is returned from the grep command then the roll should have been created as... mlnx-ofed-*.iso. If you built the roll on a Rocks frontend then proceed to the installation step. If you built the roll on a Rocks development appliance you need to copy the roll to your Rocks frontend before continuing with installation.

Installation

To install, execute these instructions on a Rocks frontend:

% rocks add roll mlnx-ofed-$(ROLLNAME)*.iso
% rocks enable roll mlnx-ofed-$(ROLLNAME)
% cd /export/rocks/install
% rocks create distro
% rocks run roll mlnx-ofed-$(ROLLNAME) | bash

...where $(ROLLNAME) may be unique for your build and depends on the running kernel of your build host and the version of MLNX_OFED_LINUX that you built.

On the most recent version of OS/MLNX_OFED_LINUX deployed to Comet this would be...

% rocks add roll mlnx-ofed-4.6-1.0.1.1-3.10.0-957.27.2.el7*.iso
% rocks enable roll mlnx-ofed-4.6-1.0.1.1-3.10.0-957.27.2.el7
% cd /export/rocks/install
% rocks create distro
% rocks run roll mlnx-ofed-4.6-1.0.1.1-3.10.0-957.27.2.el7 | bash

Configuration

The mlnx-ofed roll will likely need configuration for your system in order to work properly. Specifically, the creation and/or modification of the files...

/etc/infiniband/openibd.conf
/etc/infiniband/connectx.conf
/etc/modprobe.d/mlx4_core.conf

...will be unique for each system.

athanasio / mlnx-ofed-roll