User Manual

Mellanox OFED OverviewRev 2.1-1.0.6

Mellanox Technologies

1 Mellanox OFED Overview

1.1 Introduction to Mellanox OFED

Mellanox OFED is a single Virtual Protocol Internconnect (VPI) software stack which operates

across all Mellanox network adapter solutions supporting 10, 20, 40 and 56 Gb/s InfiniBand (IB);

10, 40 and 56 Gb/s Ethernet; and 2.5 or 5.0 GT/s PCI Express 2.0 and 8 GT/s PCI Express 3.0

uplinks to servers.

All Mellanox network adapter cards are compatible with OpenFabrics-based RDMA protocols

and software, and are supported with major operating system distributions.

Mellanox OFED is certified with the following products:

• Mellanox Messaging Accelerator (VMA™) software: Socket acceleration library that

performs OS bypass for standard socket based applications.

• Mellanox Unified Fabric Manager (UFM®) software: Powerful platform for managing

demanding scale-out computing fabric environments, built on top of the OpenSM

industry standard routing engine.

• Fabric Collective Accelerator (FCA) - FCA is a Mellanox MPI-integrated software

package that utilizes CORE-Direct technology for implementing the MPI collectives

communications.

1.2 Mellanox OFED Package

1.2.1 ISO Image

Mellanox OFED for Linux (MLNX_OFED_LINUX) is provided as ISO images or as a tarball,

one per supported Linux distribution and CPU architecture, that includes source code and binary

RPMs, firmware, utilities, and documentation. The ISO image contains an installation script

(called

mlnxofedinstall) that performs the necessary steps to accomplish the following:

• Discover the currently installed kernel

• Uninstall any InfiniBand stacks that are part of the standard operating system distribu-

tion or another vendor's commercial stack

• Install the MLNX_OFED_LINUX binary RPMs (if they are available for the current

kernel)

• Identify the currently installed InfiniBand HCAs and perform the required firmware

updates

1.2.2 Software Components

MLNX_OFED_LINUX contains the following software components:

• Mellanox Host Channel Adapter Drivers

• mlx5, mlx4 (VPI), which is split into multiple modules:

• mlx4_core (low-level helper)

• mlx4_ib (IB)

• mlx5_ib

• mlx5_core