Several general questions

[Teddy Reed]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 2:00 PM, Chris Austen <austenc at us.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> I semi answered the rest.  Hoping Teddy or others can really address #5
>
>
> Chris Austen
> POWER Systems Enablement Manager
> (512) 286-5184 (T/L: 363-5184)
>
>
>
> ----- Original message -----
> From: Norman James/Austin/IBM at IBMUS
> Sent by: "openbmc" <openbmc-bounces+austenc=us.ibm.com at lists.ozlabs.org>
> To: Shay Slobodkin <shays at mellanox.com>
> Cc: "openbmc at lists.ozlabs.org" <openbmc at lists.ozlabs.org>
> Subject: Re: Several general questions
> Date: Tue, Apr 19, 2016 11:45 AM
>
>
> 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
>
>
> Shay Slobodkin ---04/19/2016 10:12:49 AM---Hi, We have some general
> questions from our latest experience with the project:
>
> 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?
>
>>> CA: Stay with the Teddy/Joel talk as it seems like they are just a couple
>>> of weeks away from getting us up to 2016.03.
>
>
> 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?
>
>>> CA: simply because jffs2 was designed for flash file systems, it was
>>> known, we knew how to work with it.  Ubifs has some nice wear leveling
>>> support and that was not something we needed to be concerned about with our
>>> use of PNOR flash.  We did not perform any review of ubifs, so it seems
>>> reasonable to think (barring flash image size) that ubifs could be used
>
> 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.
>
>>> CA: The only reason why they were not on the AST2400 was because we never
>>> used them.  I suspect another company on this distro does already have
>>> versions of the USB (and maybe PWM?) for the 4.1 kernel.  Joel is working to
>>> get the AST2500 Kernel up to 4.4 however the priority for USB and PWM is
>>> likely lower.  If you are pushing towards support for them on the 4.4 Kernel
>>> work with Teddy and his group for the design beyond basic operations.
>

I don't think we're using either, but I'm not 100% certain that all
boards wont need USB or PWM. I can check and get back to you, in all
cases it's very difficult for us to submit patches upstream. The best
I could offer is testing. :)

>
> 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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-- 
Teddy Reed V