Feature request, option to enable SR-IOV in the bios

[Xav Paice]

Typically in environments where we use SR-IOV, we need to go to each machine and enable this in the BIOS, often via scripts and workarounds to make it scale, using 'racadm set BIOS.IntegratedDevices.SriovGlobalEnable Enabled' or the equivalent for the manufacturer.

It would be ideal if we could enable this via Maas and avoid the extra steps in deployment.

[Andres Rodriguez (andreserl)]

MAAS 2.4 has as part of its roadmap to define commissioning templates that would allow users to do things like this without having to embbed and support this in MAAS. This will be targeted to HBA’s and Firmware upgrades, but this will be reusable for other cases like this.

That said, I have a few questions:

1. How can you discover, via the OS, that you have a SR-IOV card that *needs* to be enabled in the bios?
2. The racadm binary, where does it come from? What are the conditions for it to work? Is it usable on all hardware from different manufacturers? Any extra information that you can provide?

[Andres Rodriguez (andreserl)]

3. To what models does the command your provided applies to?

Lastly, you can create your own custom Commissioning scripts that do that today, updload to Maas and enable it. Are you doing this today?

[Xav Paice (xavpaice)]

1. How can you discover, via the OS, that you have a SR-IOV card that *needs* to be enabled in the bios?

Good question, although it's not that a card needs to be enabled, more that we would like the option to do so. Unless someone knows of a flag to check for, I suspect we'd need to maintain a list of cards that can support this.

Note that it's not just a bios setting, see https://community.mellanox.com/docs/DOC-1484 for the particular cards we're talking about, there's kernel command line options to set and a setting in the module config as well. While we could configure a Juju subordinate charm to achieve the module config, and kernel commandline options are in Maas already, we want to make this easy.

2. The racadm binary, where does it come from? What are the conditions for it to work? Is it usable on all hardware from different manufacturers? Any extra information that you can provide?

I gather there is a racadm binary available somewhere, in our case what we've been doing is ssh'ing to the idrac and running the command from there, rather than in any os. These are Dell boxes. I know that other manufacturers may have totally different procedures, but that's part of the difficulty I'm hoping we can find a better way to solve.

3. To what models does the command your provided applies to?

racadm applies to Dell iDrac.

Regards commissioning scripts, that could be an option for many settings, but do require a certain amount of customisation per site. Is it possible to run a commissioning script for certain hosts only? i.e. a group of hosts which want to enable sr-iov, and a group which don't have that capability.

[Peter Sabaini (peter-sabaini)]

Just as a quick note - it'd be extremely useful to drive racadm from MAAS for a lot of Dell related setup; most Dell setup can be remote controlled via MAAS.

I'm not sure of a separate binary, but you can ssh into the oob mgmt interface same as the ipmi power control (and same creds). But the power address is not exposed to commissioning scripts (and not necessarily reachable from nodes), as far as I understand.

[Adam Collard (adam-collard)]

This bug has not seen any activity in the last 6 months, so it is being automatically closed.

If you are still experiencing this issue, please feel free to re-open.

MAAS Team

[Björn Tillenius (bjornt)]

We now track feature request at https://discourse.maas.io/c/features. Please post a topic there, since this is a non-trivial task that requires more discussion.