Setting up Machine Configuration

Introduction

Machine configuration operation is used to configure Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS) on each node in a RHOCP cluster.

Machine config operator (MCO) is provided by Red Hat to manage the operating system and machine configuration. In this project through the MCO, cluster administrators can configure and update the kernel to provision Intel Hardware features on the worker nodes.

MCO is one of the technologies used in this project to manage the machine configuration. In current OCP, MCO might reboot the node to enable the machine configuration. Since rebooting the node is undesirable, alternative machine configuration technologies are under investigation. For more details, see this issue.

The best approach is to work with the RHCOS team to push the RHCOS configuration as the default configuration for a RHOCP cluster on Day 0.

For some general configuration, we recommend you set it up while provisioning the cluster on Day 1.

If the configuration cannot be set as the default setting, we recommend using some operator to set the configuration on the fly without rebooting the node on Day 2.

Any contribution in this area is welcome.

Prerequisites

  • Provisioned RHOCP cluster. Follow steps here.

  • Setup node feature discovery (NFD). Follow steps here.

Machine Configuration for Provisioning Intel® QAT and Intel® DSA

  • Turn on intel_iommu,sm_on kernel parameter and load vfio_pci at boot for QAT and DSA provisioning

$ oc apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/intel/intel-technology-enabling-for-openshift/main/machine_configuration/100-intel-iommu-on.yaml

Note: This will reboot the worker nodes when changing the kernel parameter through MCO.

Verification

Navigate to the node terminal on the web console (Compute -> Nodes -> Select a node -> Terminal). Run the following commands in the terminal.

$ cat /proc/cmdline

Ensure that intel_iommu=on,sm_on is present.

$ chroot /host
$ lsmod | grep vfio_pci

Ensure that vfio_pci driver is present.

See Also