Mellanox Kernel Developer Toolset

This is a set of common scripts designed to help developers working with the Linux kernel, net and RDMA user space do their jobs efficiently.

Prerequisites

This toolset requires Python 3.5 or above, while mkt images will handle everything else needed for successful setup and will automatically prepare your hypervisor.

MKT heavily relies on docker to provide containerized environment and it needs modern distribution used as a host.

Minimal host OSes are

Fedora 26
Ubuntu 16.04
RedHat 8
CentOS 8

Documentation

mkt is like git. It incorporates multiple internal commands under the mkt multiplexer. Each command has man-page style documentation that can be viewed with mkt cmd --help, or online as linked below:

• mkt images
• mkt run
• mkt build
• mkt ci

Recommended work flow

Developers should have a hypervisor that hosts a VNC session or is otherwise able to accommodate their daily work, generally these tools should be run directly on the hypervisor unless otherwise noted. Developers should not work from a VM within their hypervisor.

When working with a standard Mellanox lab server images the recommended configuration is latest Fedora or Ubuntu, as desired. Old releases of RHEL lack necessary kernel features and are not supported by Docker Community Edition.

Compiling source code

The mkt build command provides compilation solution to build kernel/iproute2/rdma-core with latest development tool chain.

Recommended and optimized kernel .config is located in configs/kconfig-kvm

Testing a kernel and user pace in a VM

The mkt run command will quickly launch a VM containing a kernel for testing.

Continious integration

The mkt ci command will perform continious integration tests over local source code.

Installation

The tools are currently designed to run from a source tree and not as root. Clone the repository, and link the main tool into your path:

$ cd /swgwork/`whoami`
$ git clone https://github.com/Mellanox/mkt.git
$ ln -s /swgwork/`whoami`/mkt/mkt ~/bin/

This assumes your shell profile has configured ~/bin/ to be in your local search path, with something like this in the .bash_profile:

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin

From time to time, git pull to get the latest version.

Command line argument completion

mkt support command line argument completion, however it relies on python argcomplete to be enabled in the shell. Follow the directions https://pypi.org/project/argcomplete/#global-completion to enable this for your shell of choice.

Several other commonly used tools make use of this, so it is recommended to enable it globally.

Local settings

Local preferences can be configured in the ~/.config/mellanox/mkt/hv-hostname.mkt file. FIXME

Docker preparation

mkt uses docker images from the Mellanox private docker container registry (harbor.mellanox.com). By default mkt will download required images automatically upon first use.

Images can be generated locally by running the mkt images command. This may be faster if the user has a slow network connection to the harbor server.