It is recommended to upgrade your BlueField product to the latest software and firmware versions available to benefit from new features and latest bug fixes.
The NVIDIA® BlueField® DPU is shipped with the BlueField software based on Ubuntu 22.04 pre-installed. The DPU's Arm execution environment has the capability of being functionally isolated from the host server and uses a dedicated network management interface (separate from the host server's management interface). The Arm cores can run the Open vSwitch Database (OVSDB) or other virtual switches to create a secure solution for bare metal provisioning.
The software package also includes support for DPDK as well as applications for accelerated encryption.
The BlueField DPU supports several methods for OS deployment and upgrade:
Full OS image deployment using a BlueField boot stream file (BFB) via RShim interface
Full OS deployment using PXE which can be used over different network interfaces available on the BlueField DPU (1GbE mgmt, tmfifo or NVIDIA® ConnectX®)
Individual packages can be installed or upgraded using standard Linux package management tools (e.g., apt, dpkg, etc.)
The DPU's BMC software (i.e., BMC firmware, ERoT firmware, DPU golden image, and NIC firmware golden image) is included in the BFB. The BFB installation updates BMC software components automatically if BMC credentials (i.e., BMC_USER and BMC_PASSWORD) are provided in bf.cfg.