Preparation¶

Obtain the Mellanox OFED ISO file from Mellanox official site and mount it onto suggested target location on the xCAT MN according your OS and ARCH:

mkdir -p /install/post/otherpkgs/<osver>/<arch>/ofed

mount -o loop MLNX_OFED_LINUX-<packver1>-<packver2>-<osver>-<arch>.iso \
  /install/post/otherpkgs/<osver>/<arch>/ofed

Take sles11 sp1 for x86_64 as an example

mkdir -p /install/post/otherpkgs/sles11.1/x86_64/ofed/

mount -o loop MLNX_OFED_LINUX-1.5.3-3.0.0-sles11sp1-x86_64.iso \
  /install/post/otherpkgs/sles11.1/x86_64/ofed/

Take Ubuntu14.4.1 for Power8 LE as an example

mkdir -p /install/post/otherpkgs/ubuntu14.04.1/ppc64el/ofed

mount -o loop MLNX_OFED_LINUX-2.3-1.0.1-ubuntu14.04-ppc64le.iso \
  /install/post/otherpkgs/ubuntu14.04.1/ppc64el/ofed

[NOTE]

Mellanox provides OFED files with tarball and ISO two format, but for xCAT, we just support ISO format right now.

Copy Sample script mlnxofed_ib_install shipped by xCAT into /install/postscripts before using, such as

cp /opt/xcat/share/xcat/ib/scripts/Mellanox/mlnxofed_ib_install \
    /install/postscripts/mlnxofed_ib_install

The mlnxofed_ib_install invokes a script mlnxofedinstall shipped by Mellanox OFED ISO. If you want to pass the argument to mlnxofedinstall, you set the argument to the environment variable mlnxofed_options which could be read by mlnxofed_ib_install. For example: PPE requires the 32-bit version of libibverbs, but the default mlnxofed_ib_install will remove all the old ib related packages at first including the 32-bit version of libibverbs. In this case, you can set the environment variable mlnxofed_options=--force when running the mlnxofed_ib_install. For diskful, you should put the environment variable mlnxofed_options=--force in mypostscript.tmpl. myposcript.tmpl is in /opt/xcat/share/xcat/templates/mypostscript/ by default. When customize it, you should copy it into /install/postscripts/myposcript.tmpl

mlnxofed_options='--force'
export  mlnxofed_options