PreparationΒΆ

Obtain the Mellanox OFED ISO file from Mellanox official site and put it into one place under /install directory depending on your need.

[NOTE]

  • Mellanox provides OFED drivers in tarball and iso formats. xCAT only supports the iso format at this time.
  • Mellanox provides different OFED ISOs depending on operating system and machine architecture, named like MLNX_OFED_LINUX-<packver1>-<packver2>-<osver>-<arch>.iso, you should download correct one according your environment.

Copy mlnxofed_ib_install.v2 into /install/postscripts and change name to mlnxofed_ib_install

cp /opt/xcat/share/xcat/ib/scripts/Mellanox/mlnxofed_ib_install.v2 \
   /install/postscripts/mlnxofed_ib_install

chmod +x /install/postscripts/mlnxofed_ib_install

mlnxofed_ib_install has some options, ‘-p’ is always needed. Below are the details of these options:

  • -p: [required]–the directory where the OFED iso file is located
  • -m: [optional]–the mlnxofed_ib_install invokes a script mlnxofedinstall shipped by Mellanox OFED iso. Use this option to pass arguments to the mlnxofedinstall. You must include -end- at the completion of the options to distinguish the option list. if you don’t pass any argument to mlnxofedinstall, defualt value --without-32bit --without-fw-update --force will be passed to mlnxofedinstall by xCAT.
  • -i: [required for diskless]–the image root path
  • -n: [required for diskless]–nodeset status, the value is ‘genimage’

In general you can use mlnxofed_ib_install like below

mlnxofed_ib_install -p /install/<path>/<MLNX_OFED_LINUX.iso>

If need to pass --without-32bit --without-fw-update --add-kernel-support --force to mlnxofedinstall, refer to below command

mlnxofed_ib_install -p /install/<path>/<MLNX_OFED_LINUX.iso> \
    -m --without-32bit --without-fw-update --add-kernel-support --force -end-