Mellanox Technologies - ibdump HCA Sniffing Utility

Project owner: Itay Avraham, itayavr@mellanox.com

Table of Contents

1. Overview
2. How to get Wireshark
3. Known Issues
4. How to Compile

1. Overview

The ibdump tool dumps InfiniBand traffic that flows to and from Mellanox adapter cards and provides a similar functionality to the tcpdump tool on an Ethernet network. The ibdump tool generates a packet dump file in .pcap format, the file can be loaded by the Wireshark tool for graphical traffic analysis.
Using this tool enables the user to analyze network behavior and performance, and to debug applications that send or receive InfiniBand network traffic. To display a help message which details the tools options run "ibdump -h".

2. How to Get Wireshark

Download the current release from www.wireshark.org for a Linux or Windows environment.

Note: Although ibdump is a Linux application, the generated .pcap file may be analyzed on either operating system.

Note: The InfiniBand plug-in released with the current Wireshark version has a basic IB packets parser which includes Verbs level, IPoIB adn some SMP Mads parsing. To get the latest version of the IB plugin, which includes EoIB, SDP, and FCoIB parsing, download the latest Wireshark daily build:

• For Windows: Download the exe installer from http://www.wireshark.org/download/automated/win32/ and install it
• For Linux: Download the Wireshark dev source tarball from http://www.wireshark.org/download/automated/src/ and build it

3. Known Issues

• ibdump may encounter packet drops upon a burst of more than 4096 (or 2^max-burst) packets.
• Packets loss is not reported by ibdump.
• Outbound retransmitted and multicast packets may not be collected correctly.
• ibdump may stop capturing packets when run on the same port of the Subnet Manager (E.G.: opensm). It is advised not to run the SM and ibdump on the same port.
• Ibdump does not support 5th gen IB devices (ConnectX-4 & newer) when compiled without FW tools (when using make WITHOUT_FW_TOOLS=yes). In order to use Ibdump on 5th generation ib devices please compile with one of the other options below.

4. How to Compile