New Platform Guide

[Joel Stanley]

Hi Patrick,

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 3:48 AM, Patrick Venture <venture at google.com> wrote:
> Where is the new platform guide?
>
> In trying to get the quanta board running with everything; I've often run
> into stumbling blocks when trying to define what packages are required and
> what need to be replaced with custom versions -- for things like sensors.
>
> Often I've been more or less reduced to checking the journal logs to see if
> something is saying why it's not running (settings.py was crashing which
> meant ipmid wouldn't start as an example).  It took some source searching to
> figure out that x really depended on some object existing.  Often those were
> in the service file, but not every time.  And especially as OpenBMC is a
> moving target, this has been somewhat discouraging.  Especially when the
> "supported" platforms all stem from the skeleton which still has its fingers
> in many places.

As an end-user of the userspace who does not grok the systemd part of
OpenBMC, I also find it hard to navigate. I look forward to
improvements in this area.

>
> That said, there are a lot of dependencies between packages, and things that
> you receive that maybe you don't want or need or aren't configured properly.
> For example, I don't know why or what the led-manager is doing but it's on
> my system running.  I don't believe I configured it.
>
> If there is a guide, then I didn't see it and I apologize.
>
> If there isn't a guide -- I can start one; however, I won't really have to
> do it properly until some time in July.  My approach would be, create a new
> platform that mimics Zaius but under a different name and see what it takes
> to output a similar image and what is really required -- although difficult
> for me to test.  So maybe a new Quanta image from scratch and see what's
> running, and why and what things need to be configured.

I would appreciate this too. Let me know if I can help out.

Cheers,

Joel