Hardware Plugins

Hardware plugins are similar to status plugins but are called less frequently since they are assumed to be more static kinds of information, e.g. the motherboard serial number or CPU vendor information. They are stored as a sub-field of the node's information and can be viewed with:

scyld-nodectl --all ls -L

As with status plugins, scripts-available/hardware is populated with Penguin-provided scripts covering a range of hardware options.

Default frequency is data collection every 300 seconds but this may be overridden on a node-by-node basis with attribute _hardware_secs.

For larger-scale management and control, one can set the _hardware_plugins and/or _hardware_secs attributes inside an attribute group and then join nodes to that group.

Building Hardware Plugins into an Image

As with status plugins, admins can sym-link or add scripts to the scripts-enabled/hardware directory inside a disk image.

On-The-Fly Plugins

The _hardware_plugins attribute is used for enabling/disabling hardware plugins on-the-fly.

If _hardware_plugins=infiniband, then the system will look for the script in scripts-available/hardware/infiniband.sh.

Available Hardware Plugins

• corehardware

  • provides basic hardware information about the server: total RAM, CPU count, CPU architecture, CPU model, BIOS/UEFI mode, boot style, vendor and product information, BIOS version/date/vendor

  • Note that ram_total is reported in KiB, not bytes; so ram_total=1000 indicates that 1024000 bytes of total memory is available

• infiniband

  • provides basic information about any Infiniband network devices found on the server

• storage

  • provides basic information about any storage devices found, including NVME

• nvidia

  • provides basic information about an NVIDIA GPUs or accelerators

Note

Changes to _hardware_plugins will likely be detected on the next status cycle, usually every 10 seconds, but will not be processed until the next hardware-update cycle, usually every 300 seconds unless changed by the admin.