How to update Mellanox Firmware on OpenPower Servers

Mellanox Technologies being a openPOWER foundation member, has worked towards providing support towards Little Indian POWER based distros.

Mellanox supports the their cards (has official drivers) following ppc64LE OS:

Ubuntu, Fedora, SLES, PowerKVM, RHEL and CentOS

If you have multiple mellanox adapters in the same box, it can get tricky to find the exact device ID and flash the firmware to adapter.

Step1 : Grab the model number (PSID) of Mellanox Nic you have in your server

a) mst start

b) mst status 

c) mstflint -d <PCI-device-id-of-adapter> q

where PCI device id can be gotten from command:   b)  and is of the example format: 0002:01:00.0

d) Find the PSID   (Format of PSID : MT_1270116023)

Output from c) contain the PSID

 

Step2: 

Find and download the latest firmware for the adapter in below webpage using above found PSID

http://www.mellanox.com/page/firmware_download

Step3:

Unzip the firmware binary image (.zip file) from Step 2

Burn the FW image. Enter:

flint -d <device_name> -i <binary image> burn

Exact device name can be gotten from: mst status

Format of device name: /dev/mst/mt<dev_id>_pci{_cr0|conf0}

Either cro or conf0 string will work in above command.

Step4:

reboot

Step5:

check if your firmware is updated with below command

ibstat

OS support for Linux on Power (Little Endian)

OpenPOWER movement is gaining pace. Linux community has been overwhelmingly supportive of Little Indian port of Power (PPC64LE).  As a result, most of the leading Linux server distributions have built server images in the past couple of years.

Through this post I want to aggregate the installer links to server install images for PPC64LE. Where available I also listed cloud images used to boot up VM’s / (OpenStack guests).

OS Hypervisor Install image Guest Installer Image
Fedora 23 Refer to Link Link
Fedora 22 Refer to Link Link
Fedora 24 Refer to Link Link
Ubuntu 15.10 Refer to Link Link
Ubuntu 15.04 Refer to Link Link
Ubuntu  14.04 LTS Refer to Link Link
Centos 7.2 Refer to Link NA (But you can use init from RHEL)
OpenSUSE 13.2 Refer to Link Link
Debian 8 Refer to Link NA
PowerKVM 3.1 Refer to Link NA
Ubuntu 16.04 Refer to Link Link
RHEL 7.2 Refer to Link (Needs Login) Link
SLES 12 Refer to Link (Needs Login) Link

Hopefully this table helps the audience who are just getting started on power servers, to finish a quick install.