Installing NDCTL and DAXCTL from Source on Linux
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These instructions provide a step-by-step guide for installing the ndctl and daxctl utilities from the GitHub project .
There are a number of packages required for the build steps that may not be installed by default. For information about the required packages, see the "BuildRequires:" lines in ndctl.spec.in.
To successfully compile ndctl and daxctl from source with documentation, the following packages are required
autoconf
automake
asciidoc (asciidoctor)
bash-completion
doxygen
gcc
gcc-c++ (g++)
git
glib2
glib2-devel
graphviz
json-c-devel
keyutils-libs-devel (libkeyutils-dev)
kmod
kmod-devel
libfabric
libfabric-devel
libtool
libudev-devel
libuuid-devel
ncurses
pandoc
pkg-config
rubygem-asciidoctor (asciidoctor)
xmlto
To install these prerequisites, use:
Fedora 21 or earlier
Fedora 22 or later
2.2) Create a working directory to clone the ndctl GitHub repository to, eg: 'downloads'
2.3) Clone the repository:
The following configures ndctl to be installed in to the /usr/local directory.
For a full list of configure options use:
Note: If you want to compile with a different compiler other than gcc, you have to provide the CC and CXX environment variables. For example:
These variables are independent and setting CC=clang does not set CXX=clang++.
To compile ndctl with debugging, use the --enable-debug option:
The ndctl code uses many statically defined functions which the compiler will optimize as inline assembly when referenced only once. This means the function name is removed from the ELF symbol table and tools such as gdb, ltrace, or bpftrace cannot show this information. It can make it more difficult to understand code flow or troubleshoot issues. Use the -fno-inline -g3 -O0 options to compile ndctl with no optimizations to make all symbols (functions) available for tracing, use:
Once ndctl has successfully been compiled, it can be installed using the following:
The unit tests run by make check require the nfit_test.ko module to be loaded. To build and install nfit_test.ko:
Obtain the kernel source. For example, git clone -b libnvdimm-for-next git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/nvdimm/nvdimm.git
Skip to step 3 if the kernel version is >= v4.8. Otherwise, for kernel versions < v4.8, configure the kernel to make some memory available to CMA (contiguous memory allocator). This will be used to emulate DAX. CONFIG_DMA_CMA=y CONFIG_CMA_SIZE_MBYTES=200 or cma=200M on the kernel command line.
Compile the libnvdimm sub-system as a module, make sure "zone device" memory is enabled, and enable the btt, pfn, and dax features of the sub-system: CONFIG_X86_PMEM_LEGACY=m CONFIG_ZONE_DEVICE=y CONFIG_LIBNVDIMM=m CONFIG_BLK_DEV_PMEM=m CONFIG_ND_BLK=m CONFIG_BTT=y CONFIG_NVDIMM_PFN=y CONFIG_NVDIMM_DAX=y CONFIG_DEV_DAX_PMEM=m
Build and install the unit test enabled libnvdimm modules in the following order. The unit test modules need to be in place prior to the depmod that runs during the final modules_install make M=tools/testing/nvdimm sudo make M=tools/testing/nvdimm modules_install sudo make modules_install
Now run make check in the ndctl source directory, or ndctl test, if ndctl was built with --enable-test.
The unit tests will validate that the environment is set up correctly before they try to run. If the platform is misconfigured, i.e. the unit test modules are not available, or the test versions of the modules are superseded by the "in-tree/production" version of the modules make check will skip tests and report a message like the following in test/test-suite.log:
If the unit test modules are indeed available in the modules 'extra' directory the default depmod policy can be overridden by adding a file to /etc/depmod.d with the following contents:
The nfit_test module emulates pmem with memory allocated via vmalloc(). One of the side effects is that this breaks 'physically contiguous' assumptions in the driver. Use the --align=4K option to ndctl create-namespace to avoid these corner case scenarios.
Earlier releases of Ubuntu and Debian do not have libfabric1 or libfabric-dev available in the repository. If these libraries are required, you should compile them yourself. See
2.1) If you're behind a company proxy, configure git to work with your proxy server first. The following configures a HTTP and HTTPS proxy for all users. Refer to the for more options and information.