Mellanox Technologies
                             *********************

                     Mellanox Firmware Upgrade Shell README
                                Version 0.0.01
                               January 04, 2010


Table of Contents
=================
1. Overview
2. Package Contents
3. HW and SW REQUIREMENTS
4. Usage
   4.1 Creating a Bootable Image
   4.2 Booting from the USB Flash Drive
   4.3 Getting the latest firmware for your device
   4.4 Transferring the Firmware Binary to the Bootable USB Drive
   4.5 Upgrading Firmware
5. Revision History


1. Overview
===========
Mellanox Firmware Upgrade Shell is a light-weight USB-bootable Linux operating
system image, which enables to burn or upgrade firmware on any Mellanox Host
Channel Adapter (HCA) without installing or modifying the native operating
system.

2. Package Contents
===================
1. mstflint - firmware burning tool. For details, see:
   http://www.mellanox.com/pdf/firmware/mstflint_README.txt
2. mstvpd - displays HCA VPD information
3. mstmcra - reads/writes configuration registers


3. HW and SW REQUIREMENTS
=========================
- USB Drive of at least 128MB capacity
- Linux station


4. Usage
========
4.1 Creating a Bootable Image
-----------------------------
- Plug the USB Drive into a Linux station
- Identify the USB drive block device. This will usually look like
  /dev/sdX. If you still cannot identify the device, run dmesg to print
  the kernel message buffer. The output will look something like this:
    ...
    usb-storage: device found at 3
    USB Mass Storage support registered.
    usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
    Vendor: SanDisk   Model: Cruzer            Rev: 6.01
    Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 00
    SCSI device sda: 7858175 512-byte hdwr sectors (4023 MB)
    ...
  The "sda" after SCSI device is the name of your USB device.
- Unzip the firmware shell image.
- To transfer the image onto your flash drive and make it bootable run:
   > dd if=fwshell.img of=/dev/xxx bs=1024 count=51k
   Where xxx is the name of your USB device which you found in the
   previous step.
- You can now boot from your USB flash drive.

4.2 Booting from the USB Flash Drive
------------------------------------
- Plug the USB drive into the station.
- Reboot the station.
- When the system is starting up, you will need to enable boot-from-USB
  in your BIOS. Please refer to your server vendor for instructions on how 
  this is done.
- Wait until the following message is displayed, and then press ENTER.
    Mellanox Firmware Update Shell ver0.1.001

    Please press Enter to activate this console.
   
4.3 Getting the latest firmware for your device
-----------------------------------------------
- To get the latest firmware binary for your device, you will
  need to know the appropriate PSID number.
- Boot from your USB drive as explained in step 4.2.
- To find out your device's PCI address, run:
   > lspci -d 15b3:
   This will only display information about Mellanox devices. The output
   will look something like this:    
     07:00.0 InfiniBand: Mellanox Technologies MT26428 [ConnectX IB QDR, PCIe 2.0 5GT/s] (rev b0)
   Note the address displayed in the first column (i.e., 07:00.0), you
   will need this later. If more than one device is displayed, identify
   which one you wish to upgrade, and note the appropriate address.
- To query the device at address 07:00.0, run:
    > mstflint -d 07:00.0 -qq q
  The output will look like this:
        -W- Running quick query - Skipping full image integrity checks.
     
        Image type:      ConnectX
        FW Version:      2.7.0
        Device ID:       26428
        Chip Revision:   B0
        Description:     Node             Port1            Port2            Sys image
        GUIDs:           0002c9030006bac2 0002c9030006bac3 0002c9030006bac4 0002c9030006bac5
        MACs:                                 0002c906bac2     0002c906bac3
        Board ID:         (MT_0D80110009)
        VSD:
        PSID:            MT_0D80110009

- Go to the Mellanox website at www.mellanox.com and download the
  appropriate firmware according to the type of your HCA device and
  the PSID as displayed in the mstflint query.

4.4 Transferring the Firmware Binary to the Bootable USB Drive
----------------------------------------------------------------
In Windows:
   - Connect the drive to your computer's USB port.
   - Copy the binary image into the Removable Drive that appears.

In Linux:
   - In order to mount the USB drive, your system needs to support
     the vfat file system. Run:
      > modprobe vfat
     If you see an error message similar to "Module vfat not found",
     then the system does not support vfat, and this package cannot be used.
   - Connect the drive to your computer's USB port.
   - Three new devices appear in /dev. These will look like sda,
     sda1, and sda2.
   - Mount the flash drive on your Linux file tree. For example, run:
       > mkdir /tmp/usb
       > mount /dev/sda1 /tmp/usb
   - Copy the binary image into the directory you mounted.

4.5 Upgrading Firmware
----------------------
- Boot from your USB drive as described in step 4.2.
- The files that were placed in step 4.4 can be found under /mnt/usb0.
- To burn the new firmware on your HCA, run:
   > mstflint -d 07:00.0 -i /mnt/usb0/image.bin b
   Where 07:00.0 is the PCI address of your device (see step 4.3 for
   help with finding this), and image.bin is the binary firmware
   file you've downloaded.


Check http://www.mellanox.com/pdf/firmware/mstflint_README.txt for details
on MST utilities included in this package.


5. Revision History
===================
- Version 0.0.01: Initial release