Several general questions

[Norman James]

I answered 1, 3, and 6


Regards,
Norman James
IBM - POWER Systems Architect
Phone: 1-512-286-6807 (T/L: 363-6807)
Internet: njames at us.ibm.com




From:	Shay Slobodkin <shays at mellanox.com>
To:	"openbmc at lists.ozlabs.org" <openbmc at lists.ozlabs.org>
Date:	04/19/2016 10:12 AM
Subject:	Several general questions
Sent by:	"openbmc" <openbmc-bounces+njames=us.ibm.com at lists.ozlabs.org>



Hi,

We have some general questions from our latest experience with the project:

1. We saw some corresponding about out of the box experience and we were
wondering how does the BMC should be burnt for the first time in
production. Currently we have limited speed of debug UART on AST2520, also
Aspeed recommend to use this interface for debug purpose only. We also
faced a problem to burn BMC using Abatron BDI3000, does anyone have
experience working with it?

>> For the first time flash, an external SPI flash programmer is usually
used.   The DediProg SF100 works with no issues.


2. Several u-boot versions were mentioned this week at mailing list, we
currently use u-boot based on 2013.7 with porting AST2520 stuff from Aspeed
EVB u-boot. Can you suggest a u-boot version to merge with?

3. Is there some standard method performing BMC upgrade on site from host
CPU? Is there a best practice of upgrade granularity? Meaning, do you
suggest to upgrade whole image or maybe just specific partition (only DTB
for example)?

>> When flashing from the host, we do no currently support a partial
upgrade.   We boot the BMC into a mode where it doesn't use the flash
filesystem and then use SOCFlash from Aspeed.   You can reboot the BMC into
this special mode with ipmitool from host CPU.   Through REST, we do
support upgrades of kernel, readonly filesystem, rw filesystem, and uboot
separately.  In the deploy directory, the image-* files are for this and
packaged up in the tar.

4. We saw that most openbmc systems are using jffs2 file system. We thought
to use ubifs as it has some advantages over jffs2. Can you share the
motivation of using jffs2 for BMC project and is there special reason for
doing so?

5. Some Aspeed EVB drivers such as USB, PWM were not ported to openbmc
kernel tree yet. We were planning to port them and wonder if there is any
special reason they weren’t ported yet.

6. Building the project yields a lot of files under the “deploy” folder of
build. We were wondering which files to use for simply flashing a system
(using flashcp?) and which should be used for production.

>> flash-[system_name] can be directly flashed with the a programmer,
SOCFlash, or flashcp.

Thank you for your assistance,
Shay
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