OpenBMC Image Management

[Stewart Smith]

Adriana Kobylak <anoo at linux.vnet.ibm.com> writes:
>> On Jun 21, 2017, at 12:42 AM, Stewart Smith <stewart at linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Adriana Kobylak <anoo at linux.vnet.ibm.com <mailto:anoo at linux.vnet.ibm.com>> writes:
>>>> On Jun 19, 2017, at 12:44 AM, Stewart Smith <stewart at linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Adriana Kobylak <anoo at linux.vnet.ibm.com> writes:
>>>>>> Why is there mboxbridge separate from phosphor-mboxd?
>>>>> 
>>>>> Because the mboxbridge is being used by other companies as a reference
>>>>> to be able to implement the mailbox daemon in their own BMC firmware
>>>>> stack for other openpower systems, we didn’t want to “pollute” the
>>>>> repository with openbmc-specific and c++ implementation that could
>>>>> confuse them.
>>>> 
>>>> Why are there OpenBMC specific things in mboxd?
>>>> 
>>>> Why can't the reference implementation be used? What's deficient in it?
>>> 
>>> For OpenBMC, we’re having the PNOR chip with a filesystem, so mboxd
>>> would read/write files instead of looking for the data at an offset in
>>> the chip. Nothing deficient with it, just a different implementation
>>> that needs to be handled.
>> 
>> Why not have an MBOX protocol that supports partitions/files natively
>> then? Why not develop this upstream? Surely this is something others
>> could be interested in.
>> 
> It’d be available in the openbmc/phosphor-mboxd repo for anybody that
> wants to use it. Or what do you mean by develop it upstream?

I mean in https://github.com/openbmc/mboxbridge - the reference
implementation.

>> It seems really backwards having a bunch of things convert to/from FFS
>> for no reason.
>
> We’re not converting back and forth, if the pnor is blank, we’ll
> attach ubi to it, and if the pnor is formatted as ffs it’ll be
> reformatted once to ubi.

I mean that I don't see any patches changing how we build things in
op-build, so there has to be some unpacking of the content going on
there.

-- 
Stewart Smith
OPAL Architect, IBM.