NVIDIA BlueField DPU BSP v4.6.0

About This Document

NVIDIA® BlueField® DPU software is built from the BlueField BSP (Board Support Package) which includes the operating system and the DOCA framework. BlueField BSP includes the bootloaders and other essentials for loading and setting software components. The BSP loads the official BlueField operating system (Ubuntu reference Linux distribution) to the DPU. DOCA is the software framework and SDK for the development of applications and infrastructure services. DOCA includes runtime libraries; the DOCA Runtime stack for Arm supports various accelerations for storage, networking, and security. As such, customers can run any Linux-based application in the BlueField software environment seamlessly.

This guide provides product release notes as well as information on the BSP and how to develop and/or customize applications, system software, and file system images for the BlueField platform.

Note

Important: Make sure to download the latest available software packages for the procedures documented in this guide to run as expected.

Intended Audience

This document is intended for software developers and DevOps engineers interested in creating and/or customizing software applications and system software for the NVIDIA BlueField DPU platform.

Software Download

To download product software, refer to the DOCA SDK developer zone.

Technical Support

Note

For BlueField-3, a firmware version of 32.38.1002 or greater requires a BFB version of 2.2.0 or higher. Downgrading to lower BFB/firmware versions may result in anomalous behavior.

Note

Make sure to perform a graceful shutdown of the Arm OS in advance of performing system/host power cycle when required by the manual.

Customers who purchased NVIDIA products directly from NVIDIA are invited to contact us through the following methods:

Customers who purchased NVIDIA M-1 Global Support Services, please see your contract for details regarding technical support.

Customers who purchased NVIDIA products through an NVIDIA-approved reseller should first seek assistance through their reseller.

Glossary

Term

Description

ACE

AXI coherency extensions

ACPI

Advanced configuration and power interface

AMBA®

Advanced microcontroller bus architecture

ARB

Arbitrate

ATF

Arm-trusted firmware

AXI4

Advanced eXtensible Interface 4

BDF address

Bus, device, function address. This is the device's PCIe bus address to uniquely identify the specific device.

BERT

Boot error record table

BF_INST_DIR

The directory where the BlueField software is installed

BFB

BlueField bootstream

BMC

Board management controller

BSD

BlueField software distribution

BSP

BlueField support package

BUF

Buffer

CBS

Committed burst size

CHI

Coherent hub interface; Arm® protocol used over the BlueField Skymesh specification

CIR

Committed information rate

CL

Cache line

CMDQ

Command queue

CMO

Cache maintenance operation

COB

Collision buffer

DAT

Data

DEK

Data encryption key

DMA

Direct memory access

DOCA

DPU SDK

DOT

Device ownership transfer

DPA

Data path accelerator; a n auxiliary processor designed to accelerate data-path operations

DPDK

Data plane development kit

DPI

Deep packet inspection

DPU

Data processing unit, the third pillar of the data center with CPU and GPU

DVM

Distributed virtual memory

DW

Dword

EBS

Excess burst size

ECPF

Embedded CPU physical function

EIR

Excess information rate

EMEM/EMI

External memory interface; block in the MSS which performs the actual read/write from the DDR device

eMMC

Embedded multi-media card

ESP

EFI system partition

ESP header

Encapsulating security payload

EU

Execution unit. HW thread; a logical DPA processing unit.

FIPS

Federal Information Processing Standards

FPGA

Field-programmable gate arrays

FS

File system

FW

Firmware

GDB

GNU debugger

GPT

GUID partition table

HCA

Host-channel adapter

HNF

Home node interface

Host

When referring to "the host" this documentation is referring to the server host. When referring to the Arm based host, the documentation will specifically call out "Arm host".

  • Server host OS refers to the Host Server OS (Linux or Windows)

  • Arm host refers to the AARCH64 Linux OS which is running on the BlueField Arm Cores

HW

Hardware

hwmon

Hardware monitoring

IB

InfiniBand

ICM

Interface configuration memory

IKE

Internet key exchange

IPMB

Intelligent platform management bus

IPMI

Intelligent platform management interface

IR

Intermediate representation

KGDB

Kernel debugger

KGDBOC

Kernel debugger over console

LAT

Latency

LCRD

Link credit

LSO

Large send offload

LTO

Link-time optimization

MMIO

Memory-mapped I/O

MSB

Most significant bit

MSS

Memory subsystem

MST

Mellanox software tools

NAT

Network address translation

NIC

Network interface card

NIST

National Institute of Standards and Technology

NS

Namespace

OCD

On-chip debugger

OOB

Out-of-band

OS

Operating system

OVS

Open vSwitch

PBS

Peak burst size

PCIe

PCI Express; Peripheral Component Interconnect Express

PF

Physical function

PIR

Peak information rate

PK

Platform key

PKA

Public key accelerator

POC

Point of coherence

RD

Read

RDMA

Remote direct memory access

RegEx

Regular expression

REQ

Request

RES

Response

RMC

Remote management controller

RN

Request node

RN-F – Fully coherent request node

RN-D – IO coherent request node with DVM support

RN-I – IO coherent request node

RNG

Random number generator/generation

RoCE

Ethernet and RDMA over converged Ethernet

RQ

Receive queue

RShim

Random Shim

RTT

Round-trip time

RX

Receive

SA

Security association

SBSA

Server base system architecture

SDK

Software development kit

SF

Sub-function or scalable function

SG

Scatter-gather

SHA

Secure hash algorithm

SMMU

System memory management unit

SNP

Snooping

SQ

Send queue

SR-IOV

Single-root IO virtualization

STL

Stall

Sync event

Synchronization event

TBU

Translation buffer unit

TIR

Transport interface receive

TIS

Transport interface send

TLS

Transport layer security

TRB

Trail buffer

TSO

TCP send offload

TSO

Total store order

TX

Transmit

UDS

Unix domain socket

UEFI

Unified extensible firmware interface

UPVS

UEFI persistent variable store

VF

Virtual function

VFE

Virtio full emulation

VM

Virtual machine

VPI

Virtual protocol interconnect

VST

Virtual switch tagging

WorkQ or workq

Work queue

WQE

Work queue elements

WR

Write

WRDB

Write data buffer

Related Documentation

Document Name

Description

InfiniBand Architecture Specification, Vol. 1, Release 1.3.1

The InfiniBand Architecture Specification that is provided by IBTA

Firmware Release Notes

See Firmware Release Notes

MFT Documentation

See Firmware Tools Release Notes and User Manual

NVIDIA OFED for Linux User Manual

Intended for system administrators responsible for the installation, configuration, management and maintenance of the software and hardware of VPI adapter cards

WinOF Documentation

See WinOF Release Notes and User Manual

NVIDIA BlueField BMC Software User Manual

This document provides general information concerning the BMC on the NVIDIA® BlueField® DPU, and is intended for those who want to familiarize themselves with the functionality provided by the BMC

NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU User Guide

This document provides details as to the interfaces of the board, specifications, required software and firmware for operating the board, and a step-by-step plan of how to bring up BlueField-3 DPUs

NVIDIA BlueField-2 Ethernet DPU User Guide

This document provides details as to the interfaces of the board, specifications, required software and firmware, and a step-by-step plan of how to bring up BlueField-2 Ethernet DPUs

NVIDIA BlueField-2 InfiniBand/Ethernet DPU User Guide

This document provides details as to the interfaces of the board, specifications, required software and firmware, and a step-by-step plan of how to bring up BlueField-2 InfiniBand/Ethernet DPUs

NVIDIA BlueField InfiniBand/Ethernet DPU User Guide

This document provides details as to the interfaces of the board, specifications, required software and firmware, and a step-by-step plan of how to bring up BlueField InfiniBand/Ethernet DPUs

NVIDIA DOCA SDK

The NVIDIA DOCA™ SDK enables developers to rapidly create applications and services on top of NVIDIA® BlueField® data processing units (DPUs), leveraging industry-standard APIs. With DOCA, developers can deliver breakthrough networking, security, and storage performance by harnessing the power of NVIDIA's DPUs.

NVIDIA BlueField Reference Platform Hardware User Manual

Provides details as to the interfaces of the reference platform, specifications and hardware installation instructions

NVIDIA BlueField Ethernet Controller Card User Manual

This document provides details as to the interfaces of the board, specifications, required software and firmware for operating the card, hardware installation, driver installation and bring-up instructions

NVIDIA BlueField UEFI Secure Boot User Guide

This document provides details and directions on how to enable UEFI secure boot and sign UEFI images

NVIDIA BlueField Secure Boot User Guide

This document provides guidelines on how to enable the Secure Boot on BlueField DPUs

NVIDIA BlueField SNAP and virtio-blk SNAP Documentation

This document describes the configuration parameters of NVMe SNAP and virtio-blk SNAP in detail

PKA Driver Design and Implementation Architecture Document

This document provides a description of the design and implementation of the Public Key accelerator (PKA) hardware driver. The driver manages and controls the EIP-154 Public Key Infrastructure Engine, an FIPS 140-3 compliant PKA and operates as a co-processor to offload the processor of the host.

PKA Programming Guide

This document is intended to guide a new crypto application developer or a public key user space driver. It offers programmers the basic information required to code their own PKA-based application for NVIDIA® BlueField® DPU.

© Copyright 2023, NVIDIA. Last updated on Mar 19, 2024.