SGI provides two primary software packages to enable your SGI systems to run with improved performance and enhanced technical support features:

The SGI Foundation Software suite provides the core set of tools and utilities, as described in “SGI Foundation Software CD Contents”. The SGI Performance Suite products provide additional performance enhancements, as described in the SGI Performance Suite 1.2 Start Here.

The SGI Foundation Software 2.4 release is fully supported on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1 (SLES 11 SP1) base distribution or the Red Hat Enterprise Server 6 (RHEL 6) base distribution. It also runs on the Community ENTerprise Operating System (CentOS 6) base distribution. While SGI support will answer questions relating to any of these products, it does not provide technical support for the CentOS operating system.

The SGI Foundation Software 2.4 release supports X86-64 systems only.

SGI hardware platforms and operating system configuration settings supported by SGI are documented at the following URL: http://www.sgi.com/servers/altix/

This section describes the major contents of the SGI Foundation Software 2.4 CD, as follows:

This section describes how to get software updates for SGI Foundation Software 2.4 release.

Detailed instructions for downloading and installing SGI Foundation Software 2.4 updates are available from the SGI Foundation Software product pages on Supportfolio: https://support.sgi.com/content_request/194480/index.html.

---

Note: You must have a Supportfolio account to access this page and the SGI update server.

---

Customers that received SGI Foundation Software 2.4 pre-installed on their new SGI Altix system may run the following command to add the proper update source for SGI Foundation Software 2.4:

$ /usr/sbin/sgi-foundation-update-source

This script will prompt you for your Supportfolio login and then add the proper SGI update source for the given architecture and base operating system.

For information on the basic input/output system (BIOS), Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) firmware, Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) control utility, Field Replaceable Unit/Sensor Data Record (FRUSDR) software, Hierarchical Storage Controller (HSC) software, LSI RAID firmware, Platform Manager cluster management software, InfiniBand drivers, INTEL MPI Runtime Environment Kit for Linux, and Java Runtime Environment (JRE), see the SGI Altix XE Firmware/Software page on SGI Supportfolio at: https://support.sgi.com/content_request/229992/index.html

For information on SGI Altix ICE system firmware, see the “Firmware Management” section in Chapter 3, “System Operation” and the “System Firmware” section in Chapter 5, “System Maintenance, Monitoring, and Debugging” in the SGI Management Center for Altix ICE available on http://docs.sgi.com.

Get the latest BIOS for your SGI Altix UV 1000 or SGI Altix UV 100 series system at SGI Supportfolio at https://support.sgi.com. For instructions for flashing compute blade BIOS, see “Upgrading System BIOS” in the SGI Altix UV CMC Controller Software User's Guide.

---

Warning: Please backup your license key files prior to installing SLES11 SP1, RHEL 6, and/or SGI Performance Suite 1.2 products. A license key file is not included in these RPMs.

---

In terms of software licensing support, the Red Hat and SUSE distributors do not ship any code. ISVs are responsible for obtaining and including software licensing components into their products.

SGI Foundation Software contains a licensing mechanism called LK. LK was developed by SGI for SGI products only. For more information, see the “SGI LK License Facility” chapter in the Linux Configuration and Operations Guide or SGI Altix UV Systems Linux Configuration and Operations Guide on the SGI Technical Publications Library at http://docs.sgi.com.

For more information, see the specific product release notes or the FAQ, as follows:

http://www.sgi.com/support/licensing/faq.html

If you encounter any license related problems, please contact your local support center at this location:

http://www.sgi.com/support/supportcenters.html

Embedded Support Partner (ESP) is a support infrastructure which is integrated into the operating system. ESP components capture and store system level events, system configuration information, system availability information, provide an electronic logbook of activities performed on the system, log calls to the ESP database at SGI and other support related activities. For more information, see Embedded Support Partner User Guide available on http://docs.sgi.com .

The SGI topology application programming interface (API) allows a workload management system (WMS) to obtain topology information from SGI systems. For more information on the SGI topology API, see the sgitopo(8) and topology(1) man pages.

The check feature utility, chkfeature(8), checks the contents of /etc/opt/sgi/features directory and provides status. Without arguments, it prints a list of all the files. To use the chkfeature command, you must first load the chkfeature module, as follows:

module load chkfeature

# chkfeature
sgi-array            status               on     
sgi-cpuset           status               on     
sgi-foundation       status               on     
sgi-job              status               on     
sgi-libbitmask       status               on     
sgi-libcpuset        status               on     
sgi-lk               status               on     
sgi-memacct          status               on     
sgi-mpt              status               on     

To determine if a feature is active, perform the following:

# chkfeature -a
sgi-array            active               on     
sgi-cpuset           active               on     
sgi-foundation       active               on     
sgi-job              active               on     
sgi-libbitmask       active               on     
sgi-libcpuset        active               on     
sgi-lk               active               off    Not applicable 
sgi-memacct          active               on     
sgi-mpt              active               on    2.03 

For more information, see the chkfeature (8) man page.