EFA Installer README

The EFA installer will install the userspace libraries and kernel modules necessary to use the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) on EC2 instances. Additional software may be required, such as Intel MPI or the nccl-ofi-plugin for machine learning applications using NCCL.

Public Documentation

Refer to the official documentation for official instructions to use the installer.

Installer Usage

The efa_installer.sh script managing installing operating system specific packages. Most software is installed in /opt/amazon/efa/, except for configuration packages that must place files in /etc and the rdma-core package, which is designed to only install in /usr. The following command line arguments are available to efa_installer.sh:

  • --debug-pacakges: Install the debug packages next to standard packages.
  • --uninstall: Uninstall all packages installed by the EFA installer.
  • --yes: Assume yes to any prompts and run the installer without prompting for verification.
  • --no-verify: Skip running EFA functionality verification tests at end of installer. Useful if building an AMI on an instance type which does not support EFA.
  • --skip-limit-conf: Skip installing configurations to change the default limits for locked pages.
  • --skip-kmod: Do not install the EFA kernel module while installing user-space packages. Useful for installing EFA libraries in containers.
  • --enable-gdr: Enable GPUDirect RDMA support. This will result in the installation of a kernel module which can only be loaded if the NVIDIA driver stack is already loaded, so limits the kernel module to only working on instance types with NVIDIA GPUs.
  • --minimal: Only install the kernel module and rdma-core. Do not install Open MPI or Libfabric.

Installed Packages

  • dkms
  • rdma-core
  • libfabric
  • Open MPI
  • efa-config
  • efa-profile
  • efa kernel module

Other system packages may be installed as dependencies of these packages.