Windows Support

Verifying RShim Drivers Installation

1. Open the Device Manager when no drivers are installed to make sure a new PCIe device is available as below. 
   
2. Run the installer to install all 3 drivers (MlxRshimBus.sys, MlxRshimCom.sys and MlxRshimEth.sys).
   
3. Make sure the Bus driver created 2 child devices after the installation (Com port and the Ethernet adapter). 
   
   
   

At this time, PuTTY application or any other network utility can be used to communicate with DPU via Virtual Com Port or Virtual Ethernet Adapter (ssh). The Com Port can be used using the 9600 baud-rate and default settings. 

Accessing BlueField DPU From Host

The BlueField DPU can be accessed via PuTTY or any other network utility application to communicate via virtual COM or virtual Ethernet adapter. To use COM:

1. Open Putty.
2. Change connection type to Serial.

3. Run the following command in order to know what to set the "Serial line" field to:

   C:\Users\username\Desktop> reg query HKLM\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM | findstr MlxRshim
   	\MlxRshim\COM3		REG-SZ		COM3

   In this case use COM3. This name can also be found via Device Manager under "Ports (Com & LPT)".
   

4. Press Open and hit Enter. 

   

To access via BlueField management network adapter, configure an IP address as shown in the example below and run a ping test to confirm configuration.

RShim Ethernet Driver

The device does not support any type of stateful or stateless offloads. This is indicated to the Operating System accordingly when the driver loads. The MAC address is a pre-defined MAC address (CA-FE-01-CA-FE-02).  The following registry keys can be used to change basic settings such as MAC address.

For instructions on how to find interface index in the registry (nn), please refer to section "Finding the Index Value of the Network Interface" in the WinOF-2 User Manual under Features Overview and Configuration > Configuring the Driver Registry Keys.

mlnxhpcRShim Bus Driver

This driver does all the read/write work to the hardware registers. User space application can send down IOCTL’s to restart the system on chip or to push a new BlueField boot stream image.

mlnxhpcRshimCmd Tool

mlnxhpcRshimCmd is a command line tool that enables the user to:

• Restart the DPU.
• Push a boot stream file (.bfb). A BFB file is a generated BlueField boot stream file that contains Linux operating system image that runs on the DPU. BFB files can be downloaded from the NVIDIA DOCA SDK webpage.

mlnxhpcRshimCmd -RestartSmartNic <Option> -BusNum <BusNum>

mlnxhpcRshimCmd -EnumDevices
mlnxhpcRshimCmd -PushImage c:\bin\MlnxBootImage.bfb -BusNum 11
mlnxhpcRshimCmd -RestartSmartNic 1 -BusNum 11

mlnxhpcRshimCmd -h

BlueField UEFI System Boot Customizations during Installation

Bluefield's UEFI system boot options and more can be customized during the BFB Installation through the use of configuration parameters in the bf.cfg file. For further information on the bf.cfg file, refer to the BlueField Documentation.

To include the bf.cfg file into the BFB installation, append the file to BFB file as described below:

1. Copy the BFB file to a local folder. For example: 

   Copy <path>\DOCA_1.4.0_BSP_3.9.2_Ubuntu_20.04-5.20220707.bfb c:\bf\MlnxBootImage.bfb

2. Append the bf.cfg file into the BFB file.

   Cd c:\bf
   Copy /b MlnxBootImage.bfb + bf.cfg MlnxBootImage_with_bf_cfg.bfb

3. Download the BFB image. 

   RshimCmd -PushImage c:\bf\MlnxBootImage_with_bf_cfg.bfb -BusNum 11

As the bf.cfg is intended for Linux OSes, it should be created according to Linux rules. For example, the lines of this text file should end in LF and not in CR/LF as accepted in Windows.

All the syntax should be as the accepted by the OS expects. For example, there should be no spaces in the middle of "set" statements: NET_RSHIM_MAC=00:1a:ca:ff:ff:05.

EventLogs and Driver Logging

All driver logging is part of the Mellanox-WinOF2-Kernel trace session that comes with the network drivers installation. The default location to the trace is at %SystemRoot%\system32\LogFiles\Mlnx\Mellanox-WinOF2-System.etl.

The following are the Event logs RShim drivers generate:

mlnxhpcRShim Bus Driver

mlnxhpcRShim Serial Driver

mlnxhpcRShim Ethernet Driver