Agent skill · NVIDIA
doca-bare-metal-deployment
Use this skill for launching, supervising, debugging, OR platform lifecycle on a BlueField — BFB install, RShim/TMFIFO, host PF rebind, post-BFB recovery — taking a DOCA-linked binary to a healthy run directly on hardware (host x86 + BlueField NIC over PCIe, or BlueField Arm bare-metal). No container, no kubelet. Covers launch mode (direct, tmux, systemd), PCI/NUMA/ CPU/IRQ binding, co-tenant isolation (cgroup-v2/netns/numactl), a seven-layer error taxonomy, and a six-state BlueField lifecycle classifier. Trigger even when user does not say "bare-metal" — implicit phrasings include "binary exits 1 right after launch", "systemd keeps restarting it", "no matching device on the BF", "bfb-install exited 0 but DPU is dead", "ping 192.168.100.2 works but ssh fails", "host PFs aren't showing netdevs". Destructive firmware burn / mlxconfig set requires explicit confirmation via doca-hardware-safety; containers, library APIs, env prep, and build use other skills.
What it needs
About 6k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
DOCA bare-metal deployment Where to start: This skill is the bundle's home for operating a DOCA-linked application binary directly on hardware — no container, no kubelet, no static-pod manifest. It is the parallel of doca-container-deployment for the non-container path. If the user has a DOCA-linked binary they built (per the canonical workflow in doca-programming-guide) and they want to know how to actually run it on the host or on the BlueField Arm cores correctly, open TASKS.md and start at configure. If the question is what shape does the bare-metal runtime even have and what is the deployment contract, start at CAPABILITIES.md. If the user is not yet sure whether their target system shape is the container path or the bare-metal path, route the recognition step to doca-setup first; only return here once bare-metal is the confirmed shape. Audience This skill serves external DOCA developers and operators who have a DOCA-linked application binary they built and want to run it directly on hardware — i.e., people who already have: a DOCA-linked application binary they built per doca-programming-guide ## build, a real BlueField NIC and a host that talks to it (the host x86 path — DOCA host install on the host talks to the BlueField NIC over PCIe), OR a BlueField with a console or SSH to the Arm side (the BlueField Arm bare-metal path — DOCA installed on the DPU Arm cores; the binary runs there directly), and a desire to RUN that binary directly on the hardware, not inside a kubelet-standalone-managed container. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills NVIDIA/doca-bare-metal-deployment