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[Testbed-admins] [dkotz@cs.utexas.edu: NetFPGA in our testbed?]

We recently had a discussion on the testbed-ops list about getting
NetFPGAs running in another Emulab instance. I've excerpted what I think
are the most generally-relevant messages below for the benefit of
others...

-- 
/-----------------------------------------------------------
| Robert P Ricci <ricci@cs.utah.edu> | <ricci@flux.utah.edu>
| Research Associate, University of Utah Flux Group
| www.flux.utah.edu | www.emulab.net
\-----------------------------------------------------------
--- Begin Message --- I did some searching, and it looked like the docs online were how to allocate NetFPGAs in the Utah emulab. I have a new researcher who wants to add some nodes to our testbed with NetFPGAs either in addition to, or preferably, in place of the NICs for the experimental network. Is that going to be scary and/or improbable? We'd probably buy Dell r200s, assuming the cards fit in them. 

- dave

--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- 
On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 11:30:37AM -0600, David A. Kotz wrote:
> I did some searching, and it looked like the docs online were how to 
> allocate NetFPGAs in the Utah emulab.  I have a new researcher who wants 

Yes, the docs are for Utah -- we're the only emulab with netfpgas as of yet,
far as I know.  The support for them is not Utah-specific.

> to add some nodes to our testbed with NetFPGAs either in addition to, or 
> preferably, in place of the NICs for the experimental network.  Is that 
> going to be scary and/or improbable?  We'd probably buy Dell r200s, 
> assuming the cards fit in them.

You need to make sure to buy the stanford-recommended PC to host
them... otherwise you are likely to run into weird hardware problems that may
be unsolvable.  This is still the Dell 2950 line, I believe, but you'll want to
check.  Also, you can only connect them to Gb switch ports last I knew, since
the default software MAC gateware supported only Gb ethernet, I believe.  The
PHYs should be 10/100/1000.

> - dave

--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- 
On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 12:06:44PM -0600, David A. Kotz wrote:
> How difficult is the emulab part of it?  Is it tough to get the MFS to 
> work with it?  Any other gotchas?

The netfpga is just an add-in PCI card to a regular PC, so as long as the MFS
can boot on that regular PC, there should be no trouble -- the MFS doesn't do
anything to the netfpga.

There should be no gotchas; just let us know when you plan to add them and I'll
help you get them into your DB appropriately.  You'll probably want to grab our
FC6-NETFPGA image and customize it for your site at that time.

--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- 
David M. Johnson wrote:

On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 04:48:35PM -0600, David A. Kotz wrote:
help you get them into your DB appropriately. You'll probably want to grab our 
FC6-NETFPGA image and customize it for your site at that time.
It looks like they support the PE2950 and also a variety of Asus microATX boards for do-it-yourself boxes. I'll probably at least give it a shot in the Dell r200 I'm testing now, which by the way, seems to get along just fine with our testbed setup, in case you haven't tried any there in Utah.
Do you have an emulabized CentOS image, or did you make the NetFPGA software work on an unsupported OS? 

Nope, we don't do CentOS... I just did a few hacks to get things working on
Fedora Core 6 -- I think it was just some little perl and makefile nits.
It works just fine on Fedora, which is quite similar to CentOS anyway.
We have a NetFPGA in an r200, and I'm ready to grab an image to try on it. Should I start an experiment on Utah's emulab and grab it from there, or are the images available for direct download? I also need to grab a 64bit OS image for our regular PE1950 machines. 

- dave

--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- 
On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 05:08:34PM -0600, David A. Kotz wrote:
> We have a NetFPGA in an r200, and I'm ready to grab an image to try on 
> it.  Should I start an experiment on Utah's emulab and grab it from 
> there, or are the images available for direct download?  I also need to 
> grab a 64bit OS image for our regular PE1950 machines.

You can grab http://www.emulab.net/downloads/FC6-NETFPGA.ndz and
http://www.emulab.net/downloads/FEDORA8-64-STD.ndz , which are both utah images
that have not been "generic-ized".

--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- 
David M. Johnson wrote:

On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 05:08:34PM -0600, David A. Kotz wrote:
We have a NetFPGA in an r200, and I'm ready to grab an image to try on it. Should I start an experiment on Utah's emulab and grab it from there, or are the images available for direct download? I also need to grab a 64bit OS image for our regular PE1950 machines. 

You can grab http://www.emulab.net/downloads/FC6-NETFPGA.ndz and
http://www.emulab.net/downloads/FEDORA8-64-STD.ndz , which are both utah images
that have not been "generic-ized".



David,
To resurrect yet again this old and discontinuous conversation, the FC6 image doesn't work on our r200. I think maybe it's missing support for the SATA disk or something because it fails to mount root and panics. Rather than messing with building a new FC6 kernel or whatever was necessary to make it work, I decided to try installing the NetFPGA software on our FC8 image, which I know works on that machine. As you can probably guess, I'm running into some trouble with package name issues between CentOS and Fedora, and before trying to re-invent the wheel entirely, I thought I'd ask for pointers on getting NetFPGA working on Fedora, and also to make sure you weren't avoiding FC8 in favor of FC6 for a reason. 

- dave

--- End Message ---