Bluefield 1st gen BSP source or release

Infrastructure & Networking BlueField
1

Hello, I am looking for the files that were linked from DPDK docs located at https://doc.dpdk.org/guides-20.11/platform/bluefield.html - especially the toolchain/os/drivers.

Is there somewhere an archive of such legacy source code and binary releases?

The board at my disposal is MBF1H206A-ESNAN, which implies 1st gen of BF.

I would like to revive it in our lab, with a fresh and up to date Gentoo build.

2

Hi,
Unfortunately, the documentation/software/code of the BF-1 is no longer available on the official website.
Here is the BlueField documentation and SDK. It all starts with BF2.

https://docs.nvidia.com/networking/dpu-doca/index.html#dpu-hw

Regards,
Levei

3

I see. So what are our options with the BF-1 hardware?

Could the required and relevant files shared as-is, without official support to be provided further to such one time release? We really miss an archive / archival versions of docs/software for mature products.

Or the only way is to wait until a good Samaritan who has the same system would share his copy to me?

4

That is a bit old posting, but I think that might help others later.

While official support has ended, you can still go to archives and find releases that supported BF1. As far as I’ve checked (I have/had MBF1L516A-CSNAT), latest DOCA that supports the card is DOCA 1.3.1, with the filenames available, you can find firwmare based on older ubuntu, update it with rshim (if card doesn’t have rshim - you need to use usb cable to get rshim via usb) and that would also install latest firmware.

Also at some point latest archived doca release became 1.5, but if you change the version in URL you can still access older versions (probably there is a link somewhere on nvidia website, as I think I saw them).

Though I’d probably advise against building Gentoo for BF1. I’m not sure how performant is MBF1H206A (can’t find detailed specs), but MBF1L516A is actually slow, 16 cores, but at 800 MHz, won’t make it a pleasent experience. Nowadays, used BlueField-2 costs not that much and they are actually supported - so way easier to work with.