Nvidia C-ADAB, User Manual

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Installing Mellanox OFED
Installation Script
The installation script,
mlnxofedinstall
, performs the following:
Discovers the currently installed kernel
Uninstalls any software stacks that are part of the standard operating system distribution or
another vendor's commercial stack
Installs the MLNX_OFED_LINUX binary RPMs (if they are available for the current kernel)
Identifies the currently installed Mellanox Ethernet network adapters and automatically
upgrades the firmware.
Note: The firmware will not be updated if you run the install script with the ‘--without-fw-
update’ option.
Note: If you wish to perform a firmware upgrade using customized FW binaries, you can provide
a path to the folder that contains the FW binary files, by running
--fw-image-dir
. Using this
option, the FW version embedded in the MLNX_OFED package will be ignored. Example:
./mlnxofedinstall --fw-image-dir /tmp/my_fw_bin_files
Usage
./mnt/mlnxofedinstall [OPTIONS]
The installation script removes all previously installed Mellanox OFED packages and re-installs from
scratch. You will be prompted to acknowledge the deletion of the old packages.
If you need to install Mellanox OFED on an entire (homogeneous) cluster, a common strategy is
to mount the ISO image on one of the cluster nodes and then copy it to a shared file system such
as NFS. To install on all the cluster nodes, use cluster-aware tools (such as pdsh).
If your kernel version does not match with any of the offered pre-built RPMs, you can add your
kernel version by using the “mlnx_add_kernel_support.sh” script located inside the
MLNX_OFED package.
The “mlnx_add_kernel_support.sh” script can be executed directly from the mlnxofedinstall
script. For further information, please see '--add-kernel-support' option below.
Pre-existing configuration files will be saved with the extension “.conf.rpmsave”.

On Redhat and SLES distributions with errata kernel installed there is no need to use
the mlnx_add_kernel_support.sh script. The regular installation can be performed and
weak updates mechanism will create symbolic links to the MLNX_OFED kernel
modules.

On Ubuntu and Debian distributions drivers installation use Dynamic Kernel Module
Support (DKMS) framework. Thus, the drivers' compilation will take place on the host
during MLNX_OFED installation. Therefore, using "mlnx_add_kernel_support.sh" is
irrelevant on Ubuntu and Debian distributions.
