RShim Drivers and Usage

This section of the user manual describes installation and operation of NVIDIA® RShim drivers.

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.

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:

   Copy

   Copied!

               
   
               
   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.

Registry parameters

The device does not support any type of statefull 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 registry <nn>, please refer to section Finding the Index Value of the Network Interface.

Support of Multiple Bluefield Cards

When the server contains several BlueField cards, several instances of Rshim bus driver will run and each one will create two virtual adapters for COM and network interface. In this case, a unique MAC and IP addresses must be set for the virtual network adapters.

MAC address can be set either using the above registry key or the RshimCmd tool's commands below, whereas the IP address should be set manually, and it should allow communication with DPU's tmfifo_net0 interface. In this case, there is a need to set unique MAC and IP addresses also for the DPUs. The IP address is changed with the help of bf.cfg file.

To check the progress of the DPU reboot, use the COM interface by connecting to the DPU before pushing the new BFB image or resetting of DPU.

To change the way the driver boots, enter the UEFI or GRUB menus after the corresponding boot process prompts.

This driver does all the read/write work to the hardware registers. RShimCmd tool sends IOCTLs to the bus driver to restart the system on chip, to push a new BlueField boot stream image or to perform other actions.

RShimCmd is a command line tool that provides user with several possibilities.

            

            
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             Log Messages 
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 INFO[BL2]: start 
 INFO[BL2]: DDR POST passed 
 INFO[BL2]: UEFI loaded 
 INFO[BL31]: start 
 INFO[BL31]: runtime 
The printing of Log is performing maximum for 720 seconds.
One can stop it with Ctrl-C. 
        

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:

RShim Bus Driver

RShim Serial Driver

RShim Ethernet Driver