Bright:BIOS

BIOS Update - WARNING!!! WARNING!!!

This has been copied directly from the manual - THIS HAS NOT BEEN TESTED!!!!

Bright Cluster Manager includes a number of tools that can be used to configure and update the BIOS of nodes. All tools are located in the /cm/shared/apps/ cmbios/nodebios directory on the head node. The remainder of this section assumes that this directory is the current working directory.

Due to the nature of BIOS updates, it is highly recommended that these tools are used with great care. Incorrect use may render nodes unusable.

Updating a BIOS of a node requires booting it from the network using a specially prepared DOS image. From the autoexec.bat file, one or multiple automated BIOS operations can be performed.

BIOS Configuration

In order to configure the BIOS on a group of nodes, an administrator needs to manually configure the BIOS on a reference node using the conventional method of entering BIOS Setup mode at system boot time. After the BIOS has been configured, the machine needs to be booted as a node. The administrator may subsequently use the cmospull utility on the node to create a snapshot of the reference node’s NVRAM contents.

ssh node001 /cm/shared/apps/cmbios/nodebios/cmospull > node001.nvram

After the NVRAM settings of the reference node have been saved to a file, the settings need to be copied to the generic DOS image so that they can be written to the NVRAM of the other nodes. The generic DOS image is located in /cm/shared/apps/cmbios/ nodebios/win98boot.img. It is generally a good idea to copy the generic image and make changes to the copy only. To modify the image, it is first mounted:

cp -a win98boot.img flash.img
mount -o loop flash.img /mnt

When the DOS image has been mounted, the utility that writes out the NVRAM data needs to be combined with the NVRAM data into a single DOS executable. This is done by appending the NVRAM data to the cmosprog.bin file. The result is a DOS .COM executable.

cat cmosprog.bin node001.nvram > cmosprog.com

The generated .COM is then copied to the image and should be started from the autoexec.bat file. Note that DOS text files require a carriage return at the end of every line.

cp cmosprog.com /mnt
/bin/echo -e "A:\\\cmosprog.com\r" >> /mnt/autoexec.bat

After making the necessary changes to the DOS image, it is unmounted:

umount /mnt

Updating the BIOS

Upgrading the BIOS to a new version involves using the DOS tools that were supplied with the BIOS. Similar to the instructions above, the flash tool and the BIOS image must be copied to the DOS image. The file autoexec.bat should be altered to invoke the flash utility with the correct parameters. In case of doubt, it can be useful to boot the DOS image and invoke the BIOS flash tool manually. Once the correct parameters have been determined, they can be added to the autoexec.bat.

After a BIOS upgrade, the contents of the NVRAM may no longer represent a valid BIOS configuration because different BIOS versions may store a configuration in different formats. It is therefore recommended to also write updated NVRAM settings immediately after flashing a BIOS image (section 12.4.1). The next section describes how to boot the DOS image.

Booting the DOS image

To boot the DOS image over the network, it first needs to be copied to software image’s /boot directory, and must be world-readable.

cp flash.img /cm/images/default-image/boot/bios/flash.img
chmod 644 /cm/images/default-image/boot/bios/flash.img

An entry is added to the PXE boot menu to allow the DOS image to be selected. This can easily be achieved by modifying the contents of /cm/images/ default-image/boot/bios/menu.conf, which is by default included automatically in the PXE menu. By default, one entry Example is included in the PXE menu, which is however invisible as a result of the MENU HIDE option. Removing the MENU HIDE line will make the BIOS flash option selectable. Optionally the LABEL and MENU LABEL may be set to an appropriate description.

The option MENU DEFAULT may be added to make the BIOS flash image the default boot option. This is convenient when flashing the BIOS of many nodes.

LABEL FLASHBIOS
KERNEL memdisk
APPEND initrd=bios/flash.img
MENU LABEL ^Flash BIOS
# MENU HIDE
MENU DEFAULT

The bios/menu.conf file may contain multiple entries corresponding to several DOS images to allow for flashing of multiple BIOS versions or configurations.