I administer a HP cluster of 3 head nodes and 60 compute nodes. All run RHEL 6.2 x86_64 with kernel 2.6.32-220. All nodes have Mellanox Technologies MT26428 [ConnectX VPI PCIe 2.0 5GT/s - IB QDR / 10GigE] NICs. The nodes are interconnected by a 1GB Ethernet network and an IB network. HP professional services installed RHEL with Mellanox OFED 1.5.3. The HP technician told me that we had to use the Mellanox drivers because our Mellanox hardware wasn't well supported by the Linux IB drivers. We get our hardware and software support, including the Mellanox NICs, through HP. As of this writing, only one of the head nodes faces the outside world. This is so off-campus users can log in to the login node using 'ssh'.
So far I've held back from installing a lot of software updates, but I'm concerned about the security ramifications of running older patch levels especially of the Linux kernel. A recently announced 'zero-day exploit' affecting RHEL 6.2 x86_64 has gotten me even more concerned! I'd like to bring my nodes more up to date, but I see that Mellanox OFED 1.5.3 specifically supports only kernel release 2.6.32-220 with RHEL 6.2. RedHat is currently offering release 2.6.32-358.6.2.
Questions:
1. Are there any known issues with running mlnx_add_kernel_support.sh to build OFED RPMs for RedHat-provided kernels newer than 2.6.32-220?
2. If I do run into an issue, is there any way I can pursue getting help other than opening a ticket with HP?
3. How could I figure out whether the native Linux IB drivers support my IB hardware?
My goal: maintain a stable cluster without getting too behind on critical and security patches.
Thanks!
Dave