Rule of thumb: check Intel's Habana Support Matrix once a month for new releases. Validate anything new in a test environment before touching production.

wget -qO - https://vault.habana.ai/artifactory/api/gpg/key/public | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://vault.habana.ai/artifactory/debian focal main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/habana.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y habanalabs-dkms habanalabs-firmware habanalabs-container-toolkit
hl-smi   # confirms it worked

1. Tell the customer at least 48 hours ahead of time.
2. Test the new version on one spare/lab node first.
3. Write down the current firmware/driver versions before touching anything (hl-smi -Q firmware-version -f csv,noheader).
4. Update one node per rack, run a quick validation (habana-validate + a short training job), then move to the next rack. Never update the whole cluster at once.
5. Keep the old driver/firmware files around for 90 days in case we need to roll back — Intel's public downloads aren't always reliable to re-fetch later.
6. After updating, confirm the driver loads and reports the version you expect.

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