Doca Bare Metal Deployment

DOCA bare-metal deployment — Tasks

Where to start: The verb order is configure → build → modify → run → test → debug. For bare-metal deployment, build and modify are routing stubs — building the binary and modifying its source both live in doca-programming-guide/SKILL.md; this skill owns deployment of an already-built binary on the operator's hardware. The ## test verb is an iterative smoke-before-bulk loop, not a one-shot pass.

⚠️ Destructive / irreversible operations require explicit confirmation. Before any firmware burn, mlxconfig set, BFB reflash, or reboot/power-cycle action, load doca-hardware-safety/SKILL.md, show the exact impact and rollback plan beside the command, and obtain the operator's explicit confirmation. Do not issue the command from this skill alone.

These verbs cover the in-scope cross-cutting bare-metal-deployment workflows for an external operator launching any DOCA-linked application binary on either supported host mode — host x86 with a remote BlueField NIC over PCIe, or BlueField Arm bare-metal with the binary on the DPU directly. Every step assumes the operator has consulted the live public DOCA Programming Guide, the public BlueField / DPU User Manual, and the Linux man pages for numactl(8) / taskset(1) / systemd.service(5) / systemd.unit(5) (all reachable through doca-public-knowledge-map ## Public documentation entry points (doca-public-knowledge-map/SKILL.md#public-documentation-entry-points)) and is using them as the authoritative reference; this file prescribes the order and what to look up where, not a copy-paste runbook.

configure

Preparing the host (or BlueField Arm) target, confirming every precondition the bare-metal launch will rely on, and picking the launch mode BEFORE any binary is invoked. This is also the verb where the smoke-before-bulk posture is established up front — every later verb assumes the operator has read it here.

1. Confirm the env is healthy first. This skill expects DOCA installed and healthy on whichever side the binary is built for (host x86 OR BlueField Arm). If install health is unverified, run doca-setup ## test (doca-setup/TASKS.md#test) on the target first. If the operator has no install at all, route to doca-setup ## no-install (doca-setup/TASKS.md#no-install) for the public NGC DOCA container path; the bare-metal launch itself cannot run inside the NGC container, but the operator may use the container to build the binary they will deploy.

2. Recognise the host mode. Confirm with the operator which side the binary is going to run on — host x86 against a remote BlueField NIC over PCIe, OR BlueField Arm cores directly. The distinction governs every later step (which install layout, which devlink, which NUMA topology). If the operator is ambiguous, derive the answer from file <binary> (x86_64 vs aarch64) and the install location (/opt/mellanox/doca on the host vs on the BlueField Arm). Do NOT guess.

3. Confirm the bare-metal preconditions are closed. Walk the precondition surface in CAPABILITIES.md ## Capabilities and modes against the operator's target:

   • DOCA installed and healthy per doca-setup ## test (doca-setup/TASKS.md#test).

   • Hugepages mounted and reserved per doca-setup ## configure (doca-setup/TASKS.md#configure) step 7 (or its BlueField-Arm equivalent on the BlueField OS image).

   • Devices and representors visible per doca-setup ## configure (doca-setup/TASKS.md#configure) step 8.

   • LD_LIBRARY_PATH set correctly per doca-setup ## configure (doca-setup/TASKS.md#configure) step 6 — the runtime install version MUST match the binary's link-time pkg-config doca-* version per CAPABILITIES.md ## Version compatibility.

   • The four-way version match is closed per doca-version TASKS.md ## configure (doca-version/TASKS.md#configure).

4. Pick the launch mode. Per the launch-mode table in CAPABILITIES.md ## Capabilities and modes, the operator picks ONE of: direct foreground (best for first launch, interactive debug, smoke); tmux / screen (best for long-running with manual reattach, no supervisor); systemd- supervised (best for restart-after-reboot, journald-integrated logs, documented Restart= policy). The choice feeds the observability surface in ## run step 4 and the restart / recovery surface in ## debug layer 6. The agent does NOT pre-bake a sample systemd unit, a sample tmux invocation, or a sample direct command line — the operator authors the launch invocation against their environment.

5. Plan the hardware-resource binding. Per the hardware-binding rules in CAPABILITIES.md ## Capabilities and modes, capture (do NOT invent):

   • The PCI BDF the binary should attach to, derived from lspci -d 15b3: on the target host.

   • The NUMA node owning that BDF's PCIe root complex, derived from numactl --hardware / lscpu.

   • The CPU set the binary's polling threads should pin to, chosen to be NUMA-local to the BDF.

   • The IRQ affinity mask that mirrors the CPU set on the /proc/irq/<n>/smp_affinity side, per the public BlueField / DPU User Manual reached through doca-public-knowledge-map/SKILL.md. Record each choice; the same record drives the launch invocation in ## run and the isolation primitives in ### isolation.

6. Plan the rollback path. For any deployment that will exercise device state under load (production traffic on doca-flow, production RDMA queue pairs on doca-rdma, production I/O on a doca-comch channel), every launch on a live target must have: (a) the pre-launch device state captured (host networking, representor list, firmware-query output); (b) the previous-known-good launch invocation (or a no-binary baseline) ready to re-apply; (c) an out-of-band way to reach the target if the launch disrupts host connectivity (BlueField console, redundant management path, IPMI to the host); (d) a maintenance window agreed with whoever uses the host. For interactive first-launch on a non-production target, the rollback bar is lower but the "be able to revert" rule still applies. When the planned launch touches hardware state itself (not just runs a DOCA workload), route to doca-hardware-safety/SKILL.md FIRST.

7. Confirm the four-way version match. Per CAPABILITIES.md ## Version compatibility, record BOTH the host (or BlueField Arm) DOCA install version via doca-version TASKS.md ## configure (doca-version/TASKS.md#configure), the binary's link-time pkg-config doca-* version (captured when the binary was built per doca-programming-guide ## build (doca-programming-guide/TASKS.md#build)), the BlueField firmware version (per the documented firmware- query surface in the BlueField / DPU User Manual), and the DOCA-version-policy row for the operator's release. A mismatch among any two is the silent "the docs say this should work" trap; align them explicitly.

build

Bare-metal deployment is the deploy verb for an already-built DOCA binary. There is no application artifact for the operator to build inside this skill — the binary the operator deploys here is the one they built per doca-programming-guide ## build (doca-programming-guide/TASKS.md#build), quoting the canonical pkg-config doca-<library> + meson pattern that lives there.

If the user is asking how to build the binary they want to deploy, hand off to doca-programming-guide ## build (doca-programming-guide/TASKS.md#build) (the canonical pattern, with C/C++ + non-C language tracks). Once that returns a binary, control returns here at ## configure step 2 (host-mode recognition) for the deploy.

If the user is asking how to build a systemd unit, a numactl invocation, or any other launch-shell artifact, the answer is the launch artifact is composed against the live env, not built ahead of time. See ## run for how the launch-mode choice from ## configure step 4 composes the launch invocation against the operator's PCI BDF / NUMA node / CPU set / Restart= policy choice.

If the user is asking how to build a DOCA library itself, that is a DOCA contributor workflow — out of scope for this skill per the audience boundary in SKILL.md.

modify

Bare-metal deployment does not have a modify a sample program workflow analogous to DOCA libraries; the deployment-side analog of "modify" is re-walk the deploy after the binary changes, after the launch invocation changes, or after the underlying env changes:

1. A binary change is a deploy event. Any rebuild of the binary (a fresh meson compile per doca-programming-guide ## modify (doca-programming-guide/TASKS.md#modify)) re-opens the smoke loop in ## test — the new binary may link against a different DOCA version, may have a different env-var contract, may exit on different signals. Re-walk ## configure step 7 (version anchors), then ## run, then ## test.

2. A launch-invocation change is a deploy event. Editing the CPU pin set, the NUMA node, the PCI BDF, the env vars, or the Restart= policy on a systemd unit changes the deployment contract; treat each edit as a fresh deploy. Re-walk ## run step 3 (launch) and ## test step 1 (smoke).

3. An env change is a deploy event. A hugepage reservation change, an LD_LIBRARY_PATH change, a kernel-module load / unload, a devlink mode flip, or a representor moved into a different netns all change the deploy preconditions; re-walk ## configure step 3 (preconditions).

4. A hardware-state change leaves this verb entirely. Any change touching device firmware (mlxconfig set, BFB reflash, firmware burn, BlueField mode flip) is owned by doca-hardware-safety/SKILL.md; this skill does NOT walk that workflow. Control returns here at ## configure step 3 once the hardware-state change is complete and verified per the meta-policy.

5. Modify the binary's source only at the programming-guide layer. If the operator is modifying the binary's source (adding a new pipe, changing a queue depth, adapting to a different DOCA library version), that change is owned by doca-programming-guide ## modify (doca-programming-guide/TASKS.md#modify)

   • the matching libs/<library> skill. Once the modified binary is rebuilt, control returns here at step 1 above.

The agent's anti-pattern alert: editing a launch invocation in place without re-walking the smoke is the canonical "my deploy silently degraded after a small change" failure. Treat every launch-side change as a fresh deploy.

run

Bringing up the DOCA-linked binary, confirming the device-attach layer reaches a healthy state, and confirming the trivial-workload liveness signal before layering any real workload on top. Every step here assumes the prerequisites in ## configure are done.

1. Confirm the binary is executable and the loader resolves DOCA. From the launch host, confirm file <binary> reports the expected arch (matches uname -m), chmod +x is set, and ldd <binary> resolves every libdoca_*.so against the install on the runtime LD_LIBRARY_PATH per doca-setup ## configure (doca-setup/TASKS.md#configure) step 3. A failure here is a layer-1 symptom in CAPABILITIES.md ## Error taxonomy and must be resolved before the binary is launched.

2. Compose the launch invocation against the captured bindings. Per ## configure step 5, the launch invocation names: the PCI BDF (or representor) the binary should attach to, derived from live lspci -d 15b3: / devlink dev show output; the CPU set and NUMA node (via the documented numactl --cpunodebind / --membind form or taskset -c <cpu-list>); the env-var surface the binary's documented contract requires (per the public DOCA Programming Guide for the library in use). The launch invocation is composed from live values; do NOT substitute a BDF, a NUMA number, or a representor name from memory.

3. Launch in the chosen launch mode. Per ## configure step 4:

   • Direct. Invoke the binary in the foreground from the shell session; stdout / stderr arrive on the terminal.

   • tmux / screen. Open a named tmux / screen session, invoke the binary inside it, detach; reattach with the documented commands when reading live output.

   • systemd-supervised. Drop the operator's authored .service unit into the documented systemd unit path (per systemd.unit(5)), systemctl daemon-reload, systemctl start <unit>. The Restart= policy in the unit must be one of the modes named in systemd.service(5); do NOT invent a mode.

4. Verify the process is up and the device attached. Per the observability surface in CAPABILITIES.md ## Observability:

   • Direct: the binary's own stdout / stderr show the documented bring-up lines from the public DOCA Programming Guide for the library in use; no documented error lines repeat.

   • tmux: reattach and read the live pane buffer.

   • systemd: journalctl -u <unit> -f shows the same documented bring-up lines. A process that is up but printing layer-3 errors "no matching device" / "representor not found" / "PCI BDF not found" per CAPABILITIES.md ## Error taxonomy is NOT ready; drop to ## debug layer 3 BEFORE proceeding.

5. Verify the trivial-workload liveness signal. The documented liveness signal for the library in use (a single matched packet for doca-flow, a single RDMA write-with-imm for doca-rdma, a single comch send for doca-comch, etc.) lives in the matching libs/<library> skill — read it now from there per doca-programming-guide CAPABILITIES.md ## Error taxonomy (doca-programming-guide/CAPABILITIES.md#error-taxonomy) for the cross-library escalation rules. If the per-library liveness signal is NOT healthy, drop to ## debug layer 4 (library error) or to the per-library skill's debug ladder — not to "restart the binary and hope".

6. Smoke before bulk (next: ## test step 1). Before driving any real workload, walk ## test step 1 once to confirm end-to-end readiness; only then layer the workload on top.

isolation

This sub-anchor covers per-tenant isolation for multiple DOCA processes co-tenant on the same BlueField. It is reached from ## run step 2 when the launch invocation crosses a tenant boundary, and from ## debug layer 7 when the symptom is co-tenant noise. The isolation rules layered here are the bare-metal-specific overlay on the standard Linux primitives named at class level in CAPABILITIES.md ## Capabilities and modes.

1. Compose the cgroup-v2 cpu / memory / io budget per tenant. Per the kernel cgroup-v2 documentation, each tenant's process is placed in its own cgroup with cpu.weight (or cpu.max for hard caps), memory.max (sized to cover the binary's resident set PLUS the hugepage accounting noted in CAPABILITIES.md ## Capabilities and modes), and io.weight if the binary touches block I/O. Set the budget BEFORE the launch; verifying after the launch is too late.

2. Compose the network-namespace per tenant when traffic isolation is required. The standard Linux primitive is ip netns add <name> + moving the per-tenant representor into the netns per the documented ip link set <repr> netns <name> form. The DOCA-specific gotcha: the DOCA library is only able to see the representor inside the netns that owns it; launching the binary in a different netns (or in the root netns when the representor was moved out) reproduces as a layer-3 "no matching device" error.

3. Compose the CPU / NUMA pinning per tenant via numactl / taskset. Per numactl(8) and taskset(1), the per-tenant CPU set is NUMA-local to the PCI BDF the binary attaches to (per ## configure step 5). The DOCA-specific gotcha: a per-tenant CPU set that crosses the NUMA boundary owning the NIC cancels the isolation gain — both tenants then compete on memory bandwidth across the NUMA interconnect.

4. Confirm hugepage accounting per tenant. Hugepages reserved per doca-setup ## configure (doca-setup/TASKS.md#configure) step 4 are a global pool; each tenant's allocation is accounted against its cgroup's memory.max per the kernel cgroup-v2 hugepage accounting rules. A memory.max value that fits the binary's resident set but starves the hugepage pool surfaces as layer-2 "process starts but exits immediately" with an EAL: Cannot get hugepage information line.

5. Verify the isolation primitives BEFORE the workload starts. Per the safety rule in CAPABILITIES.md ## Safety policy: systemd-cgls (or cat /sys/fs/cgroup/<path>/cpu.max etc.) confirms the cgroup limits are in effect; ip netns exec <name> ip link show confirms the per-tenant representor is in the right netns; taskset -p <pid> / numactl --show -p <pid> confirms the running binary is pinned to the planned CPU set / NUMA node. Adding the verification after a co-tenant complains is the wrong order.

test

Bare-metal deployment has no compile and unit-test workflow — testing is operational and end-to-end against real hardware.

## test is an iterative loop, not a one-shot pass. Every mutation (binary rebuild, launch-invocation edit, env change, co-tenant addition) re-opens the smoke sweep. Skipping the re-run after a mutation is the failure mode this loop replaces.

The smoke-before-bulk loop (rows apply to every DOCA-linked binary on the bare-metal path, not just one library):

The five steps of the smoke:

1. Trivial-arg smoke. Invoke the binary with its --help / --version equivalent (whichever the binary actually supports — the agent does NOT invent a flag). Confirm the binary executes, the dynamic loader resolves every libdoca_*.so, and the documented version / usage string appears. A failure here is layer 1 of CAPABILITIES.md ## Error taxonomy.

2. Liveness-equivalent smoke. Invoke the binary against the captured bindings from ## configure step 5 but with NO real workload offered. Confirm the binary reaches the documented bring-up lines, opens the device, and exits cleanly on SIGTERM. A failure here is layer 2 or layer 3 of CAPABILITIES.md ## Error taxonomy.

3. Trivial-workload smoke. Drive ONE operation through the binary — one packet for doca-flow, one queue-pair operation for doca-rdma, one channel send for doca-comch, etc. (per the matching libs/<library> skill's documented liveness contract). Confirm the per-library counter advances by exactly one. A failure here is layer 4 of CAPABILITIES.md ## Error taxonomy.

4. Capability + launch snapshot. Save the as-launched answer to: which binary version was running, which DOCA install version it linked against (per doca-version TASKS.md ## run (doca-version/TASKS.md#run)), which BlueField firmware version the device was on, which PCI BDF / NUMA node / CPU set the binary attached to, the chosen launch mode, the Restart= policy if systemd- supervised, the captured stdout / journald lines from the bring-up. This snapshot is the artifact that lets future debug sessions skip rediscovery — and on a HIGH-STAKES deploy it is the rollback baseline.

5. Multi-tenant smoke (only when co-tenants are planned). Bring up each additional tenant AFTER this binary, one at a time, and re-run step 3 (trivial-workload smoke) against THIS binary between additions. A regression in this binary's per-library counter that only appears once a co-tenant is added is layer 7 of CAPABILITIES.md ## Error taxonomy; walk ### isolation before queueing more tenants.

Loop termination: all applicable smoke steps passing ends the loop successfully and hands off to live traffic in ## run. Otherwise stop and escalate when either (a) the same smoke step has failed twice with the same pass/fail outcome and unchanged saved capability + launch evidence from step 4, or (b) ten total smoke-loop iterations have completed without a green result. Neither stop condition proves which lower layer is at fault. Escalate to the per-library skill's debug ladder plus doca-debug TASKS.md ## debug (doca-debug/TASKS.md#debug) with the captured layer evidence.

debug

Layered diagnosis. Walk the seven deployment layers in this order; do not skip down without clearing the layer above. After those seven, run the cross-cutting host check. The seven layers match CAPABILITIES.md ## Error taxonomy.

1. Process-won't-start layer (layer 1). Is the binary even executing? Symptoms: "command not found", "permission denied", "cannot execute binary file: Exec format error", or error while loading shared libraries: libdoca_*.so from the dynamic loader. Resolution: confirm the binary's arch via file <binary> matches uname -m; confirm executability (ls -l); resolve every shared object with ldd <binary>; set LD_LIBRARY_PATH per doca-setup ## configure (doca-setup/TASKS.md#configure) step 3. Do NOT add a randomly-chosen libdoca_*.so to LD_LIBRARY_PATH from memory — quote from the live install layout per doca-public-knowledge-map ## Layout of an installed DOCA package (doca-public-knowledge-map/SKILL.md#layout-of-an-installed-doca-package).

2. Process-starts-and-exits-immediately layer (layer 2). Binary launches, runs for milliseconds, exits non-zero. Symptoms: short stderr message about a missing env var, a missing config file, or EAL: Cannot get hugepage information; supervisor reports the process restarted. Resolution: read the binary's stdout / stderr (terminal / tmux pane / journalctl -u <unit> per the launch mode); re-walk the documented env-var surface in the public DOCA Programming Guide for the library in use; re-run hugepage reservation per doca-setup ## configure (doca-setup/TASKS.md#configure) step 4. NEVER paste an env-var name from memory; quote from the per-library guide.

3. Process-runs-but-cannot-find-the-device layer (layer 3). Binary stays up but per-library bring-up reports "no matching device", "representor not found", or DOCA_ERROR_NOT_FOUND from the device-open call. Resolution: re-walk the device-visibility surface per doca-setup ## configure (doca-setup/TASKS.md#configure) step 5 — confirm the PCI BDF the binary was launched with matches a live lspci -d 15b3: entry; confirm the representor is enumerated in ip link show and is in the netns the binary launched in; confirm the eswitch is in the documented mode per the public BlueField / DPU User Manual. Do NOT substitute a BDF from a previous deploy.

4. Library-error layer (layer 4). Binary attaches to the device but the workload errors with a DOCA_ERROR_* per doca-programming-guide CAPABILITIES.md ## Error taxonomy (doca-programming-guide/CAPABILITIES.md#error-taxonomy). Resolution: defer to the cross-cutting debug ladder at doca-debug TASKS.md ## debug (doca-debug/TASKS.md#debug) FIRST, then to the matching libs/<library> skill for the library-specific overlay. Per-library error codes are owned by the per-library skill, not by this one.

5. OOM / signal / resource-limit layer (layer 5). Binary disappears with no log line, or supervisor reports an unexpected exit signal. Symptoms: dmesg shows an OOM-killer entry naming the binary; supervisor reports SIGKILL / SIGTERM; restart count climbs without a matching binary-side error log. Resolution: read the supervisor's exit-status record; check dmesg for OOM; re-check the cgroup-v2 budget per ### isolation step 1; confirm the binary's documented signal-handling contract from the public DOCA Programming Guide. A memory.max that fits the resident set but starves the hugepage pool is the canonical trap.

6. Restart-loop layer (layer 6, HIGH-STAKES). Supervisor keeps re-launching the binary; each launch exits with the same exit signature; the device the binary touches may be reporting odd errors caused by the loop itself. Per the HIGH-STAKES rule in CAPABILITIES.md ## Safety policy: STOP the supervisor (systemctl stop <unit> for systemd- supervised launches; manual termination for tmux); read the binary's LAST full log surface; walk layers 1-5 above against the captured evidence; only re-enable the supervisor once the root cause is identified. Letting the supervisor loop a known-broken binary is delayed diagnosis, not resilience.

7. Co-tenant-noise layer (layer 7). This binary behaves correctly in isolation; introducing a second DOCA process (or any other process) on the same BlueField makes this binary's counters degrade. Resolution: re-walk ### isolation for the second tenant's cgroup-v2 / netns / numactl configuration BEFORE drawing a per-library conclusion; if the symptom only reproduces under co-tenancy, the diagnosis is multi-tenant isolation, not a per-library bug. Cross-cutting host check (after the seven layers; not an eighth taxonomy layer). Deployment looks healthy at every layer above but a cross-cutting host issue (kernel version, driver loaded / not loaded, PCIe link state, hugepage allocation health beyond reserved-vs-used, BFB log surface) breaks the binary's downstream behavior. Resolution: drop to doca-debug TASKS.md ## debug (doca-debug/TASKS.md#debug) for the cross-cutting debug ladder; if the symptom is a hardware-state change the operator is contemplating, route to doca-hardware-safety/SKILL.md instead of touching device state from this skill.

bluefield-lifecycle

The BlueField platform lifecycle anchor — the workflow for taking a BlueField from "powered card in the slot" to "Arm OS healthy, TMFIFO up, host PFs bound, four-way version match closed, DOCA-linked binary safely launchable per ## run". This anchor exists because the bare-metal-deployment skill's downstream verbs (## run, ## test, ## debug) all assume a working BlueField; when that assumption breaks, this section supplies the operational sequencing ladder (which evidence to collect in which order, which failure mode each evidence pattern points to, which recovery action follows). The mutating-change meta-policy stays in doca-hardware-safety/SKILL.md, and the BSP/BFB documentation entry in doca-public-knowledge-map ## Externally-productized DOCA software (doca-public-knowledge-map/SKILL.md#externally-productized-doca-software--not-in-this-bundle-but-here-is-where-to-route).

This is a reasoning ladder, not a script. The agent does not ship a bfb-install-wrapper.sh or a classify-bluefield-state.sh; it prescribes the order in which an operator should collect evidence and the recovery action each evidence pattern lattices to, quoting documented commands from the public BlueField Platform Software Manual (reached through doca-public-knowledge-map/SKILL.md), the MFT manual (flint, mlxconfig, mlxfwmanager), and the Linux man pages for modprobe(8), lspci(8), ip-route(8). Every mutating step (firmware burn, BFB reflash, mlxconfig set, kernel boot parameter change) STILL routes through doca-hardware-safety/SKILL.md for the meta-policy (preflight, OOB console, maintenance window, rollback) — this section adds only the bare-metal-deployment-specific sequencing on top.

bfb-install lifecycle

The canonical "push a BFB image from the host to the BlueField" flow. The agent walks the operator through this verb-by-verb; it does NOT fabricate the host-side bfb-install flag set, the BFB image filename, the RShim character-device path, or the bf.cfg schema — all four come from live --help on the installed tool and the public BlueField Platform Software Manual.

1. Pre-flight inventory. Capture, BEFORE any push:

   • The current BFB image / BSP version on the BlueField, from the BSP version-query path documented in the BlueField Platform Software Manual (do NOT guess a command name).

   • The current ConnectX firmware version on the BlueField's NIC side, from flint -d <bdf> q (per the MFT manual); on a BlueField this is the NIC PSID + firmware revision the new BFB will or will not match.

   • The host-side RShim userspace daemon state (dpkg -s rshim / rpm -q rshim for package install, systemctl status rshim for active (running), pgrep -a rshim for a live /usr/sbin/rshim process, ls /dev/rshim* for the character-device tree — all per the BSP manual). On DOCA 3.3+ there is NO rshim kernel module (the in-tree module was removed); lsmod | grep rshim is expected to be empty and is NOT failure evidence. If the daemon / /dev/rshim* tree is missing, the host has no path to push.

   • The OOB management path the operator will use if the push breaks the Arm OS: BMC console-over-Redfish, BMC IPMI serial-over-LAN, or the physical UART (per the BlueField BMC Software (doca-public-knowledge-map/SKILL.md#externally-productized-doca-software--not-in-this-bundle-but-here-is-where-to-route) row in the public-knowledge-map). Without one of these, the agent MUST stop and escalate to the operator responsible for the target with the captured pre-flight state and rollback plan; it must not proceed without an OOB path, per doca-hardware-safety/SKILL.md.

   • The BFB image's SHA matches the SHA the operator downloaded from the documented DOCA Downloads page (per doca-public-knowledge-map/SKILL.md#public-documentation-entry-points) — pushing a corrupted BFB is the load-bearing first-run failure for the entire flow.

2. Route BFB identity and first-boot provisioning to its owner. BlueField BSP / BFB lifecycle and installer customization are outside this DOCA SDK bundle. Do not provide credential-file paths, installer password fields, first-boot hooks, or commands that seed login state. Route the operator through the BlueField Platform Software (doca-public-knowledge-map/SKILL.md#externally-productized-doca-software--not-in-this-bundle-but-here-is-where-to-route) entry in doca-public-knowledge-map to the current public BSP manual. Require the operator to use its documented identity- provisioning workflow and approved secret-management process, verify OOB access before closing the maintenance window, and never assume credentials from the previous image survive a reimage. BlueField mode selection is routed to the same owner; this skill does not synthesize installer configuration fields or mode-changing commands.

3. Push the BFB. Run the host-side bfb-install invocation per its --help and the BSP manual. The push streams the BFB to the BlueField over RShim/PCIe; the Arm side reboots through UEFI → Linux up → first-boot init.

4. Do not trust bfb-install exit code 0 alone. This is the single most expensive failure mode in the operator's loop. bfb-install has been observed in the field to exit 0 while the Arm-side flow only partially completed — the canonical field-reported signature is "Ubuntu installation completed" (or "Ubuntu installation finished", both phrasings have been seen in different BFB releases) followed by an INFO[MISC]: NIC firmware update failed line in the RShim console / log, meaning the OS image landed but the firmware-update sub-step silently failed. The agent ALWAYS parses the actual console / log output the installer wrote, in addition to the exit code, and looks for: (a) any [MISC] or [ERR] line whose text contains a failure verb ("failed", "error", "abort"), (b) the documented Linux up marker, (c) the documented DPU is ready marker. If any of (a) is present or (b) / (c) are absent, the install is treated as partial, not complete, and the agent advances to ### bluefield-state-classifier instead of declaring success.

5. Distinguish "BFB install completed" from "readiness wait failed". "Completed" means the installer's I/O is done; it does NOT mean the Arm OS is up, TMFIFO is reachable, SSH is live, or host PFs are bound. The agent always runs the readiness sequence in ### post-bfb-recovery before re-declaring the BlueField healthy.

6. Routing for the firmware burn itself. A BFB push is a mutating change against live device state — the meta-policy in doca-hardware-safety/SKILL.md governs the preflight / OOB-console / rollback discipline that wraps this step. This section adds only the sequencing ladder; the agent loads doca-hardware-safety ALONGSIDE this skill whenever the operator's question reaches step 3 above.

rshim and tmfifo

RShim is the host-side surface that exposes the BlueField's Arm-side console (/dev/rshim<N>/console) AND the host-side network endpoint of the TMFIFO recovery interface (factory defaults per the BlueField Platform Software Manual: host-side address 192.168.100.1/30, BlueField-side address 192.168.100.2/30; the agent does NOT fabricate the subnet from memory). On DOCA 3.3+ hosts the RShim surface ships as a userspace daemon (/usr/sbin/rshim started by rshim.service); the legacy in-tree kernel module is no longer shipped. The TMFIFO interface is the recovery path when the BlueField's normal management network is broken; it is NOT a primary data path.

1. Verify RShim is attached on the host. The agent runs all three of: dpkg -s rshim / rpm -q rshim (the userspace package is installed), systemctl status rshim (the daemon is active (running)), and ls /dev/rshim* (character-device tree is present per the BSP manual). On DOCA 3.3+ lsmod | grep rshim is EXPECTED to be empty and is NOT evidence of failure — the in-tree kernel module is gone; the surface is delivered entirely by the userspace daemon. If systemctl status rshim is not active (running) OR the /dev/rshim* tree is missing, the host has no path to the BlueField's recovery surface and downstream TMFIFO checks are meaningless.

2. Verify the TMFIFO network endpoint on the host. ip addr show tmfifo_net0 (per the BSP manual's documented interface name; verify the name on the operator's host — different driver versions have shipped slightly different names). The address should be the host-side documented address.

3. Critical TMFIFO gotcha — ALWAYS ip route get before ping. A known failure mode is: the BlueField-side TMFIFO address (e.g. 192.168.100.2) gets accidentally added to the host's loopback or to tmfifo_net0 itself, so ping 192.168.100.2 from the host succeeds — but it is pinging the host, not the BlueField. The diagnostic that catches this in one command is:

   • ip route get <bf-tmfifo-address> on the host. Healthy outputs the agent should accept as "the route is going to the BlueField": <bf-addr> dev tmfifo_net0 src <host-addr> (driver versions that expose the TMFIFO interface directly) OR <bf-addr> dev tm-br src <host-addr> (BSP / DOCA-host installs that bridge tmfifo_net0 into a tm-br bridge, e.g. via multi-bfb-install). Broken output is always: <bf-addr> dev lo src 127.0.0.1 or local <bf-addr> dev lo — the address has been bound LOCALLY and every ping / ssh / curl to it is hitting the host, not the BlueField. The agent ALWAYS runs ip route get before trusting ping for TMFIFO recovery, and accepts either tmfifo_net0 or tm-br as the egress interface on the host side.

4. Soft-reset is a recovery action, not a routine action. The rshim soft-reset path documented in the BSP manual is appropriate when the Arm side is stuck in a known-recoverable state (UEFI hang post-BFB-install, console responsive but userspace dead); it is NOT routine. Routing: the operator captures the BlueField state per ### bluefield-state-classifier FIRST, then decides whether soft-reset, cold power cycle, or re-push BFB is the appropriate recovery — and loads doca-hardware-safety/SKILL.md ALONGSIDE for the meta-policy on any of those.

post-bfb-recovery

After a BFB push lands, the BlueField's downstream surface (Arm OS health, TMFIFO reachability, SSH liveness, host PFs bound, firmware version match) must be re-verified before the bare-metal-deployment skill returns to ## run. This is the "did the install actually take?" gate.

1. Wait for the documented readiness markers, not for a timer. A wall-clock sleep is not equivalent to a readiness probe. The agent polls for the documented Linux up / DPU is ready markers in the RShim console buffer (per the BSP manual), AND for the documented Arm-side SSH endpoint responding, AND for the documented BMC health endpoint reporting OK. If any of these never report ready within the manual's documented bound, the BlueField is in a partial state and the agent advances to ### bluefield-state-classifier rather than declaring success.

2. Host PF rebind sequence. A BFB push can leave the host side's mlx5 driver in a stale state: the PCI devices for the BlueField PFs are present (lspci -d 15b3: lists them) but ip link show does not enumerate the netdevs, RDMA enumeration is empty, and any DOCA program that attaches by representor name fails. The documented recovery is:

   • modprobe mlx5_core (no-op if already loaded; loads if not).

   • For each BlueField PF BDF captured at pre-flight (e.g. 0000:b3:00.0, 0000:b3:00.1): echo <bdf> > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/mlx5_core/bind per the kernel sysfs driver-binding documentation. This is a PCIe rebind, a hardware-state change: follow doca-hardware-safety ## modify (show the BDFs and the effect, get explicit confirmation) before writing.

   • Re-verify: ip link show enumerates the BlueField netdevs; ibv_devinfo enumerates the BlueField RDMA devices; devlink dev show lists the BlueField devlink instance. The agent does NOT invent the BDF strings from memory; they come from the pre-flight lspci -d 15b3: capture.

3. /home/ubuntu operational gotcha (Arm-side BlueField OS). On certain BlueField OS images, /home/ubuntu ships owned by root rather than ubuntu, which breaks the normal pattern of the ubuntu user writing logs / scratch files under their own home directory. The agent: (a) checks stat -c '%U:%G' /home/ubuntu after first SSH; (b) if it is root:root, flags it to the operator and proposes the documented chown -R ubuntu:ubuntu /home/ubuntu fix (per the BSP manual) BEFORE the operator pastes any script that writes there. Because this recursively changes ownership, capture the current ownership and obtain the operator's explicit confirmation before applying it. The fix itself is trivially documented Linux; the value is the recognition during lifecycle recovery instead of after a script fails.

4. Log copy-back to host workspace. All install / readiness / recovery evidence collected on the Arm side (the RShim console buffer, the cloud-init log, the documented BSP install log, the readiness probe output) should be copied BACK to the host workspace before the operator re-attempts the workload. Two rules: (a) use scp ubuntu@<bf-mgmt-addr>:<path> . (or the documented BSP log-export path) from the host side — pulling is safer than pushing host credentials onto the BF; (b) do NOT wrap the copy step in sudo on the host unless the operator explicitly entered sudo mode for this lifecycle session, per the smoke-before-bulk rule in ## run step 4.

5. Four-way version-match re-close. Once Arm OS is healthy and host PFs are bound, the BlueField's new BFB / firmware stack must satisfy the four-way version match owned by doca-version/TASKS.md. The agent walks the four-way match against the new BlueField state BEFORE returning to ## configure step 7. A skipped re-close after a BFB push is the most common cause of "ran fine yesterday, breaks today" symptoms.

bluefield-state-classifier

When a BFB push, a soft-reset, or a host PF rebind has been done and the BlueField is not yet confirmed healthy, the agent walks this six-state classifier IN ORDER and records every matching state in that order. It never stops at the first match. Each state names the evidence that identifies it, the most-likely root cause class, and the sequencing of the recovery action (mutating steps still load doca-hardware-safety/SKILL.md alongside; this ladder names the order, not the burns).

This is a reasoning ladder, not a binary: an Arm OS can be "Linux up" AND "host PFs unbound" simultaneously; the agent walks the ladder top-to-bottom and reports every state that matches, not just the first. The point is the sequencing of evidence collection, so two ops engineers reading the same console output reach the same triage step.

1. installer-still-running. Evidence: bfb-install is still resident on the host (ps -ef | grep bfb-install), AND the RShim console buffer is still emitting documented installer progress lines per the BSP manual. Root cause class: install in flight, not failure. Recovery: WAIT, do not abort. The bfb-install push can take many minutes on first-flash; aborting it mid-write is what creates the next state down.

2. uefi-only. Evidence: the RShim console buffer reports exit Boot Service (or the BSP manual's equivalent UEFI-exit marker) but never reaches the documented Linux up marker. Root cause class: kernel did not hand off to userspace — common after a partial BFB-install with a firmware-update error (see ### bfb-install lifecycle step 4). Recovery sequencing: capture full RShim console buffer to host, capture host-side dmesg, do NOT immediately re-push BFB; first perform a documented cold power cycle of the BlueField (via BMC per the BlueField BMC Software (doca-public-knowledge-map/SKILL.md#externally-productized-doca-software--not-in-this-bundle-but-here-is-where-to-route) row, not just reboot from the unresponsive Arm side); only if cold power cycle does NOT recover, re-push BFB under doca-hardware-safety/SKILL.md meta-policy.

3. linux-up-tmfifo-down. Evidence: documented Linux up marker present in RShim console, BUT TMFIFO probe per ### rshim and tmfifo step 2 returns no host-side address. Root cause class: TMFIFO interface never came up (driver / udev / link-state). Recovery sequencing: re-check host-side RShim daemon, run the documented TMFIFO bring-up procedure from the BSP manual, THEN re-run ### rshim and tmfifo step 3 (the ip route get gotcha) — a freshly-bound TMFIFO on the host can land in the loopback failure mode and look like it is working.

4. tmfifo-up-ssh-down. Evidence: documented TMFIFO probe passes (and ip route get confirms the route is going to the BlueField, not local loopback), BUT SSH to the documented Arm-side management endpoint refuses or hangs. Root cause class: Arm-side sshd not yet listening (still in init), or the deployment's documented identity-provisioning workflow did not complete. Recovery sequencing: wait the documented sshd-ready bound from the BSP manual; if still down, use the established OOB path and route credential recovery to the operator's approved BSP provisioning and secret-management process. This skill does not prescribe credential files, installer fields, or recovery commands.

5. arm-ok-host-pfs-unbound. Evidence: Arm-side SSH alive, Arm OS reports healthy (uptime > a few seconds, dmesg clean), BUT host-side enumeration is broken — lspci -d 15b3: shows the BlueField PFs, ip link show does NOT show the BlueField netdevs, ibv_devinfo is empty, DOCA programs cannot attach by representor name. Root cause class: stale host mlx5 driver-binding state post-BFB push. Recovery sequencing: run ### post-bfb-recovery step 2 (the documented PF-rebind sequence). Do NOT proceed to launch any DOCA-linked binary in this state — every device-open will fail with a misleading error.

6. host-bf-version-mismatch. Evidence: everything above looks healthy, but the four-way version match owned by doca-version/SKILL.md does not close — host DOCA install version, BlueField BFB / BSP version, ConnectX firmware version, and binary's link-time pkg-config doca-* version do not satisfy the documented compatibility matrix in the DOCA Compatibility Policy (linked from doca-public-knowledge-map/SKILL.md#public-documentation-entry-points). Root cause class: the operator pushed a BFB but did not simultaneously align the host DOCA-Host install, OR the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/doca.list is pointed at a different release channel than what is now installed (see doca-version TASKS.md ## apt-source consistency (doca-version/TASKS.md#apt-source-consistency)). Recovery sequencing: walk doca-version/TASKS.md in full; resolve any apt-source / repo-pin drift BEFORE installing anything new; route any host-side DOCA reinstall through doca-setup/SKILL.md.

Two cross-cutting rules for this classifier:

• Match multiple states; do not stop at the first. A BlueField that just came back from a partial BFB-install can match uefi-only initially, then arm-ok-host-pfs-unbound after a cold power cycle. The agent reports the current state set and the most-recently-observed transition, not just the first match.

• Sequence recovery in classifier order. When multiple states match, apply the earliest matching state's recovery first, then re-run the classifier from state 1 before applying another recovery. Every mutating recovery still requires the explicit confirmation gate from doca-hardware-safety.

• Never declare healthy from absence of evidence. "TMFIFO ping succeeded" without ip route get is NOT evidence the BlueField is reachable (see ### rshim and tmfifo step 3). "Arm SSH connected" without uptime / dmesg / a documented health probe is NOT evidence the Arm OS finished initialising. "host-side lspci shows the PFs" is NOT evidence the PFs are usable (see ### post-bfb-recovery step 2). The classifier states are walked top-to-bottom precisely so the agent does not skip an unverified gate.

Command appendix

Bare-metal-deployment commands the verbs above reach for, grouped by purpose so the agent picks the right family without searching prose. Every row is a CLASS — the agent must not invent flags or specific values beyond what the row names; flag and value discovery is --help on the installed tool, the public DOCA / BlueField docs, or the Linux man pages, not prose recall.

Infra-aware preamble (every row below). Per the bundle's detect → prefer → fall back → report contract documented in doca-structured-tools-contract ## The agent behavior contract (doca-structured-tools-contract/SKILL.md#the-agent-behavior-contract), the agent should:

1. Probe for the matching structured helper FIRST (doca-env --json for version + devices + libraries + drivers + hugepages in one shot; collect-host-state / collect-dpu-state for the host-side device topology; version-matrix.json for "available since" lookups).

2. If the probe succeeds, the structured tool's output is the authoritative answer and the agent SHOULD NOT also run the manual command in the row below. Report "using structured <tool>".

3. If the probe fails, fall back to the manual command in the row. Report "falling back to manual chain".

4. The schemas the structured tools emit are defined in doca-structured-tools-contract ## Schemas (doca-structured-tools-contract/SKILL.md#schemas); the version-handling semantics (four-way match, NGC, headers-win) are owned by doca-version/SKILL.md.

Three cross-cutting rules for this appendix:

• Never invent a PCI BDF, a representor name, a NUMA node number, a hugepage allocation amount, or a Restart= mode name. The public DOCA Programming Guide, the public BlueField / DPU User Manual, the Linux man pages, and live lspci / numactl --hardware / devlink dev show output on the target host are the contract; prose-derived strings are the most common hallucination failure for this skill.

• Process output before device state before per-tenant resource picture. When triaging, read the binary's own stdout / stderr / journald surface first (did the binary parse its args and reach DOCA?); only then read the device-state surface (devlink / ip link / mlxconfig query); only then read the per-tenant resource surface (cgroup-v2 / numactl --show). Reading the per-tenant resource picture against a binary that never reached its device-open call is meaningless.

• Cross-link instead of duplicate. Cross-cutting env commands (pkg-config --modversion, doca_caps --version, mount | grep huge, lsmod | grep mlx5) live in doca-setup TASKS.md ## Command appendix (doca-setup/TASKS.md#command-appendix); cross-cutting debug commands (gdb, valgrind, strace, --sdk-log-level, the doca-<lib>-trace build flavor) live in doca-debug TASKS.md ## debug (doca-debug/TASKS.md#debug); this appendix names only the bare-metal-deployment-specific ones.

Deferred task verbs

• Container-path deployment of any DOCA service container on the BlueField (kubelet-standalone mode, static-pod manifests directory, pod-spec YAML, image-pull from NGC) — out of scope here. Route to doca-container-deployment/SKILL.md for the sibling deployment path.

• Full-Kubernetes-cluster operations (cluster API, kubectl, Deployment / Service / Ingress objects, cluster-wide observability, CNI overlays across DPUs) — out of scope for this bundle per the AGENTS.md non-goals. For fleet-scale DPU provisioning, see the DOCA Platform Framework on GitHub via doca-public-knowledge-map ## Public source code: GitHub (doca-public-knowledge-map/SKILL.md#public-source-code-github).

• Library-API questions (constructing a DOCA-Flow pipe, an RDMA queue pair, a Comch channel; interpreting a specific DOCA_ERROR_* code; per-library capability discovery) — out of scope here. Route to the matching libs/<library> skill via the per-library entry under doca-public-knowledge-map ## Library- and module-specific guides (doca-public-knowledge-map/SKILL.md#library--and-module-specific-guides).

• Env-preparation questions (installing DOCA on a fresh host, mounting and reserving hugepages, setting PKG_CONFIG_PATH / LD_LIBRARY_PATH, flipping the eswitch mode, IOMMU posture) — out of scope here. Route to doca-setup ## configure (doca-setup/TASKS.md#configure) and doca-setup ## test (doca-setup/TASKS.md#test); the bare-metal launch assumes these are already done.

• Hardware-state changes (mlxconfig set, firmware burn, BlueField mode flip, kernel-boot-parameter changes for IOMMU or hugepage reservation) — the change-application discipline (preflight, OOB console, maintenance window, rollback) is meta-policy owned by doca-hardware-safety ## modify (doca-hardware-safety/TASKS.md#modify); this skill always loads doca-hardware-safety ALONGSIDE when a mutating step is on the table. The bare-metal operational sequencing ladder for BFB-install / RShim / TMFIFO / host PF rebind / post-BFB recovery — what evidence to collect in what order, which classifier state lattices to which recovery action — is in scope here, in ## bluefield-lifecycle; the meta-policy governing each mutating burn is still doca-hardware-safety's.

• Cross-library programming questions (the canonical build pattern, the modify-a-sample first-app workflow, the cross-library DOCA_ERROR_* taxonomy, the program-side debug order, the trace-build flavor rationale) — out of scope here. Route to doca-programming-guide/SKILL.md for the cross-library shape and to the matching libs/<library> skill for the per-library overlay.

• Building the binary the operator is deploying — out of scope here. Route to doca-programming-guide ## build (doca-programming-guide/TASKS.md#build) for the canonical pattern (C/C++ + non-C language tracks). Once the binary is built, control returns here at ## configure step 2.

Cross-cutting

• The public DOCA Programming Guide is the single source of truth for the per-library device-open / capability / runtime contract that any DOCA-linked binary follows. The public BlueField / DPU User Manual is the single source of truth for the documented device-enumeration surface, representor naming, IRQ-affinity guidance, and firmware-query surface on the BlueField side.

• Two host modes (host x86, BlueField Arm bare-metal) and three launch modes (direct, tmux / screen, systemd- supervised) compose freely; the agent's job is to walk the combination the operator picks, not to push a default mode.

• Hardware-resource binding (PCI BDF, NUMA node, CPU set, IRQ affinity) is derived from LIVE output on the target host, never substituted from memory. The most common first-run failure is a stale BDF or NUMA number quoted from a previous deploy.

• Smoke before bulk. The trivial-arg → liveness-equivalent → trivial-workload smoke loop runs BEFORE any real workload, never after.

• Failed bare-metal process restart is HIGH-STAKES. A binary in an auto-restart loop is delayed diagnosis, not resilience; stop the supervisor, clear the root cause, only then re-enable.

• Per-tenant isolation is set up BEFORE the workload starts, not after a co-tenant complains. The standard Linux primitives apply; the DOCA-specific gotchas (NUMA-locality, hugepage accounting, representor-vs-namespace) are this skill's load-bearing contribution.

• For URL routing to the public DOCA Programming Guide, the public BlueField / DPU User Manual, and the per-library guides, see doca-public-knowledge-map ## Public documentation entry points (doca-public-knowledge-map/SKILL.md#public-documentation-entry-points) and doca-public-knowledge-map ## Library- and module-specific guides (doca-public-knowledge-map/SKILL.md#library--and-module-specific-guides).