Xeon Phi and Gentoo

[Mathias_R_]

Hi

for my master thesis I am supposed to write a kernel module which uses functions of another module on the Xeon Phi.

The testmachine I have is running RHEL 6.4.

As for the Kernel development I need and OS with a newer kernel version. I decided to use Gentoo with Kernel 3.14.14 which already has the mic_card and mic_host modules. Or maybe you have suggestions how to work with the Phi-module on RHEL 6.4, especially API like the 3.13+ kernel versions

So for now my system has the mic_host module running and lspci shows the Phi as a Coprocessor.

I also did install the mpss-daemon and micctrl which also came with the Kernel under /documentation/mic/mpssd.

As for now I cannot access or boot the card as I do not have the firmware and the ramdisk files.

Where can I get these? Or do I need to compile a 3.14.14 Kernel for the mic? How is this done?

Thanks in Advance

[TaylorIoTKidd]

Hi Mathias,

Please look at the forum post: https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/topic/368002.

Even though the post is from a year ago, it discusses rebuilding MPSS for an unsupported OS (Ubuntu). FYI, unsupported only means that Intel does not validated against the OS. For example, getting mpss working on CentOS is very simple but CentOS is not validated against by Intel.

Regards
--
Taylor
 

[Mathias_R_]

Hi Taylor

thanks for the hint

The thing is I would like to use the Linux Kernel Modules for the MIC which appeared on Version 3.13.

I also found a sample of the MPSS in the Linux Kernel documentation along with a Makefile to compile it.

Am I right that I now just need the uos.img and the ramdisk.img to make the MIC run on my Gentoo installation?

I also found out that the intel-kmod source differs from the Linux kernel MIC source. For example the Linux Kernel source has a function called mic_start to run the MIC, but I cant find a similar function in the intel kmod source

[Davide_Basilio_B_1]

Hey Mathias,

I found myself configuring a xeon PHI on Gentoo with a recent kernel (3.17.8) and I stumbled upon this thread.

I didn't manage to have it run with the drivers in the linux kernel (mic_host & co.), so what I did is port the Intel module (mic).

It just takes a few line edits to make it compile and run with Linux 3.17.8.

You can find an ebuild for it here: https://github.com/davidebasilio/xeon-phi-overlay (in sys-kernel/mic-modules).

I hope you'll find this useful.