[PATCH v2 0/4] ipmi: bt-i2c: added IPMI Block Transfer over I2C

[Brendan Higgins]

On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 7:26 PM, Corey Minyard <tcminyard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 08/09/2017 08:04 PM, Brendan Higgins wrote:
>>>
>>> Perhaps that is some level of abuse, but it's pretty common.  I'm not
>>> against it.
>>>
>>> There is standard IPMI firmware NetFN (though no commands defined) that
>>> if
>>> you use
>>> the driver automatically goes into "Maintenance mode" and modified the
>>> timeouts
>>> and handling to some extent to help with this.
>>
>> That is a really good point, I missed that.
>> ...
>>>
>>>
>>> There are ways to accomplish this that aren't that complex.  You can
>>> create
>>> an OEM
>>> command that can query the maximum message size and the ability to do
>>> sequence
>>> numbers in the messages.
>>>
>>> If messages larger than 32-bytes are supported, and the host I2C/SMBus
>>> driver
>>> supports it, you could use the standard SSIF SMBus commands to do this,
>>> they
>>> have an 8-bit length field.
>>>
>>> If sequence numbers are supported, The SSIF could use different SMBus
>>> commands
>>> to do the write and read requests.  Since this is only if you get an OEM
>>> command,
>>> and if you put the sequence numbers at the end where they are easy to add
>>> on
>>> the send side, this is a small change to the driver.
>>
>> What if we just had an OEM command that changed the message structure from
>> that point on? We could abuse the "maintenance mode" NetFN to get back
>> into
>> normal SSIF if necessary.
>
>
> Actually, I wouldn't have a separate "openbmc mode".  I would have OpenBMC
> always
> work with standard SSIF, and have separate SMBus commands for messages with
> the sequence number and messages larger than 32 bytes.
>
> I've attached a patch with what I would expect the changes to be to the host
> driver.
> It doesn't handle multiple outstanding messages, but it shows what detection
> and a
> separate SMBus command would look like.

I took a look at the patch, it seems reasonable. If I was maintaining
SSIF, I probably
would not want that kind of clutter for my admittedly weird use case,
but if you're
okay with it, then so am I.

>
>
>>> So I think the changes would be small and contained.  I'm actually ok
>>> with a
>>> different driver, but I think it would be more valuable to the OpenBMC
>>> project
>>> to have a standardized interface that would work (in a not quite as
>>> efficient
>>> mode) with software that does not use the Linux IPMI driver.
>>
>> I guess I see the all of my asks as hacky things which we can hopefully
>> remove
>> at some point. Hopefully, most OpenBMC users won't want or need these
>> things.
>> ...
>>>>
>>>> Regardless of what we do with the "BT-I2C" stuff, I am still interested
>>>> in
>>>> what
>>>> you think about this.
>>>
>>>
>>> I think you are right, it probably belongs some place else.  The way that
>>> makes the most
>>> sense to me would be to have an "ipmi" directory with a "host" and
>>> "slave"
>>> side, and since
>>> ipmi is not really a char driver, to move it to the main driver
>>> directory.
>>> That might be
>>> fairly disruptive, though.
>>
>> That was my thinking exactly.
>>
>>> The other option that makes sense to me would be to add a
>>> drivers/char/ipmi_slave directory,
>>> or something like that, and put the slave code there.  That would be less
>>> disruptive.
>>
>> Right that is the approach I took, except I called it
>> drivers/char/ipmi_bmc.
>>
>> I originally thought doing the less disruptive thing is best; however, I
>> know
>> there are also some OpenBMC people who are interested in implementing
>> IPMB. So maybe now is the time to bite the bullet and create an ipmi
>> directory under drivers/.
>
>
> I'm not sure IPMB would make much difference, there's no host side change as
> it's
> already supported.  I don't think there would be any significant code
> sharing
> between the two.

No, I don't expect much code sharing between them. I just thought it would be a
reasonable place to put IPMB, sort of like how we have a bunch of "character"
device drivers in drivers/char, but I suppose that might be somewhat of an
anti-pattern ;-)

>
> If there end up being a significant amount of common code, then it would
> definitely be worth the effort to move it.
>
>>> -corey
>>
>> In summary, I think I can live with making it a mangled form of SSIF, but
>> I would prefer to put it in its own driver.
>
>
> You can look at the patch and consider it, and consider that you would need
> to
> implement flag and event handling.  On an x86 host there would be SMBIOS
> and ACPI stuff to deal with somehow for discovery.  There's probably few
> other
> things to deal with.
>
>> In any case, I think I would rather focus on the the BMC side IPMI
>> framework
>> now, since it is a bigger change and would also reduce the work of
>> implementing a BMC side SSIF driver.
>>
>> Here is what I propose: we focus on the BMC side IPMI framework RFC that
>> I sent out the other day:
>> https://www.mail-archive.com/linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org/msg1463473.html
>> I will add a change to the BMC side IPMI framework patchset to move all
>> the
>> IPMI stuff to the new drivers/ipmi directory as discussed and then drop
>> the
>> patch in that patchset that depends on this patchset.
>>
>> Let me know what you think
>
>
> Let's hold off on the new directory, there's probably some convincing of the
> "powers
> that be" for that.
>
> I'll look at the patch set tomorrow, unless something critical comes up.

Sounds good

>
> Thanks,
>
> -corey
>

Cheers