Installing Popular Linux Distributions on BlueField

NVIDIA BlueField DPU BSP v4.7.0

Users wishing to build their own customized NVIDIA® BlueField® OS image can use the BFB build environment. See this GitHub webpage for more information.

Note

For any customized BlueField OS image to boot on the UEFI secure-boot-enabled DPU (default DPU secure boot setting), the OS must be either signed with an existing key in the UEFI DB (e.g., the Microsoft key), or UEFI secure boot must be disabled. See "Secure Boot" and its subpages for more details.

Contact NVIDIA Enterprise Support for information on the installation of Linux distributions other than Ubuntu.

The following table lists the BlueField drivers which are part of the Official Ubuntu Linux distribution for BlueField. Some of the drivers are not in the upstream Linux kernel yet.

Driver

Description

BlueField-2

BlueField-3

bluefield-edac

BlueField-specific EDAC driver

dw_mmc_bluefield

BlueField DW Multimedia Card driver

sdhci-of-dwcmshc

SDHCI platform driver for Synopsys DWC MSHC

gpio-mlxbf2

GPIO driver

gpio-mlxbf3

GPIO driver

i2c-mlx

I2C bus driver (i2c-mlxbf.c upstream)

ipmb-dev-int

Driver needed to receive IPMB messages from a BMC and send a response back. This driver works with the I2C driver and a user-space program such as OpenIPMI.

ipmb-host

Driver needed on the DPU to send IPMB messages to the BMC on the IPMB bus. This driver works with the I2C driver. It only loads successfully if it executes a successful handshake with the BMC.

mlxbf-gige

Gigabit Ethernet driver

mlxbf-livefish

BlueField HCA firmware burning driver. This driver supports burning firmware for the embedded HCA in the BlueField SoC.

mlxbf-pka

BlueField PKA kernel module

mlxbf-pmc

Performance monitoring counters. The driver provides access to available performance modules through the sysfs interface. The performance modules in BlueField are present in several hardware blocks and each block has a certain set of supported events.

mlxbf-ptm

Kernel driver that provides a debufgs interface for the system software to monitor the BlueField device's power and thermal management parameters.

mlxbf-tmfifo

TMFIFO driver for BlueField SoC

mlx-bootctl

Boot control driver. This driver provides a sysfs interface for systems management software to manage reset time actions.

mlx-trio

TRIO driver for BlueField SoC

pwr-mlxbf

Supports reset or low-power mode handling for BlueField.

pinctrl-mlxbf

Allows multiplexing individual GPIOs to switch from the default hardware mode to software-controlled mode.

mlxbf-pmc

Mellanox PMC driver

© Copyright 2024, NVIDIA. Last updated on May 9, 2024.