Infiniband network booting

Daniel M. Weeks weeksd2 at rpi.edu
Fri Apr 17 02:02:23 AEST 2020


In November 2019, I modified OpenPower firmware to support network
booting IBM Power 9 systems over Infiniband. In the coming days, I will
be submitting for review three series of patches for petitboot, a series
of patches for busybox, and a series of patches for op-build that add
the features to make this possible. While I believe these changes to be
complete for the purposes of basic use, there are some things that
remain unsupported, most notably PKEYs/subnets, which would require more
extensive changes.

There is a caveat: The petitboot and op-build patches are for older
branches since the hardware I have available is using petitboot 1.7.5
and op-build 2.0.14.

First, this requires backporting a large number of kernel changes to fix
netlink support in IPoIB. This may not affect later versions of the
firmware depending on their kernel version. I can supply this series for
review/use where there is interest.

Second, although I would like to, I have no good to way to test forward
porting these changes to recent branches until the there is a recent
firmware build supporting the hardware I have available.

-- 
Daniel M. Weeks
Lead HPC Developer
Center for Computational Innovations
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY 12180
518-276-4458


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