François Donzé - Technical consultant, HPE
June 2021
Update: September 2025
When using the HPE RESTful Interface Tool (iLOrest) or other applications like the Smart Update Manager (SUM) or the integrated Smart Update Tool (iSUT) you may get errors similar to: Chif driver not found, please check that the chif driver is installed, without any other information to identify the origin of the problem or to fix it. This article attempts to explain when this error occurs and why.
The Channel Interface (CHIF) is an HPE proprietary in-band communication path between applications and the Insight Lights Out (iLO) within HPE iLO based servers. In the details, it consists of a kernel driver and an associated dynamic loadable/shared library (.dll on Windows and .so on Linux).
This driver can only be loaded and used when an iLO chipset is embedded in the computer.
Figure 1: The CHIF allows communication between OS applications and iLO
The CHIF driver is embedded in supported Operating Systems (OS). HPE applications using this communication path are packaged with its companion library and can seamlessly use this path.
For home grown applications using the HPE Redfish library or PowerShell Cmdlets (i.e. HPESysinfoCmdlets), you may have to install it from HPE Software ProLiant Pack (SPP) or download it from the HPE Support Center before a manual installation.
The CHIF between the OS and HPE iLO has been deprecated with the introduction of iLO 7. The HPE virtual Network Interface (vNIC) becomes the preferred path.
Refer to the transitioning to iLO 7 documentation section for more information.
The iLOrest tool allows in-band and out-of-band Redfish management as explained in this article.
If you are logged in an HPE iLO 4 or iLO 5 based server as a privileged user (root or Administrator), you can perform in-band management tasks with iLOrest without providing any credentials. You just have to issue GET or SET commands in a straight forward manner to query the local iLO Redfish service.
The following picture shows an SSH root session creation, toward an HPE DL360 Gen10 with the execution of an iLOrest GET command without any formal login process. The Discovering data...Done message means that iLOrest could effectively log into the local iLO 5 and save metadata in its cache. Then, it displays the output of the GET command (Model=iLO 5).
Figure 2: Successful in-band GET command
The most typical situation is when you are logged in, as a privileged user in a non-iLO based server, a virtual machine or a laptop, and you issue an iLOrest command or launch a Python or PowerShell script performing in-band Redfish commands.
In those cases, there is no iLO underneath the operating system. Hence the CHIF driver, although present as a file somewhere on disk, cannot not be properly loaded by the application.
The most typical iLOrest invocation is:
ilorest login <RedfishService-IP-address>
ilorest cmd1
ilorest cmd2
...
ilorest logoutIf you don't provide any <RedfishService-IP-address> to the iLOrest login command, or if you omit completely this command, iLOrest uses the blobstore://. target URL and tries to connect to the local iLO via the CHIF.
If you use a Redfish client different from iLOrest that uses another library like the DMTF Python Redfish Library, you will not be able to perform in-band management through the CHIF. An alternative is to enable the iLO virtual NIC and use its IP address as target URL.
The following figure shows an SSH privileged session into a VMware virtual machine and an iLOrest in-band GET command returning the error.
Figure 3: Unsuccessful in-band GET from Virtual Machine
The next screenshot shows the same iLOrest command launched from a Microsoft Windows laptop.
Figure 4: Unsuccessful in-band GET from laptop
The following paragraphs address In-band Python scripts, PowerShell Cmdlets and VMware infrastructures with respect to the CHIF driver.
The blobstore://. URL mentioned above, can be used as well, in Redfish Python scripts based upon the HPE python-ilorest-library to perform in-band management operations. Such programs will have the same behavior as iLOrest since iLOrest uses as well the HPE Python Redfish library.
In the following picture you can see the execution in a virtual machine, of the get_ilo_ip.py python example configured for in-band management.
The grep command, following the dmidecode command returns all the lines of the get_ilo_ip.py file, containing strings SYSTEM_URL or LOGIN_ACCOUNT or LOGIN_PASSWORD. Lines starting with a # sign are commented lines, thus, not executed.
The target URL (SYSTEM_URL) points to blobstore://. and, the LOGIN_ACCOUNT and LOGIN_PASSWORD variables are empty. With this configuration, the RedfishClient method will try to connect to the CHIF driver to access the local iLO. However, it fails because it the script is executed on a virtual machine.
The result of this in-band configuration is a ChifDriverMissingOrNotFound error.
Only the last two lines of stack dump are displayed for clarity.
Figure 5: blobstore target URL
As of the writing of this article, only the HPESysinfoCmdlets uses the CHIF driver for in-band management. Other PowerShell Cmdlets like the HPEiLOCmdlets or the HPERedfishCmdlets cannot be configured for in-band management through the CHIF driver.
I've seen cases where VMware system managers installed manually a .rpm iLOrest package in their ESXi hypervisor instead of getting it installed properly with a supported HPE custom image. It is important to remember that HPE bundles and tests specific application packages of iLOrest, SUM, SUT and the Agentless Management Service (AMS) for the ESXi hypervisor. Manual installation of those applications will generate problems like the Chif driver not found error.
The previous sections of this article tried to explain the root causes of the Chif driver not found error. However you can face situations involving the CHIF driver where iLOrest commands return a valid output, but from the wrong system!
In this context, you are a privileged user launching an iLOrest script from a iLO based server, targeting a remote iLO. However, the script supplies wrong credentials to the remote iLO. In that case, iLOrest returns an error code, but sadly enough, the script does not test the return code of the login process and continues its execution.
As you are privileged on a physical iLO based system with the CHIF driver up and running, iLOrest performs following requests successfully on your system via the CHIF driver in place of the remote server. This situation is embarrassing because you perform management actions on the wrong system.
The following picture displays a script launched from an iLO 4 based computer, targeting an iLO 5, but supplying faulty username and password in the login command and discarding errors (&> /dev/null).
As a consequence, the next iLOrest command retrieves the local iLO 4 firmware version, instead of the remote iLO 5 firmware version!
Figure 6: iLOrest accessing wrong iLO
The most important things you should remember concerning the Chif driver not found error are:
The CHIF driver is an HPE proprietary driver allowing communications between applications and iLO
The error occurs when the CHIF driver cannot be loaded by applications calling it.
Avoid performing remote management tasks as an OS privileged user.
Don’t forget to check back the HPE DEV blog site for more Redfish related articles and tutorials.