New Platform Guide

[Patrick Venture]

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 7:51 AM, Chris Austen <austenc at us.ibm.com> wrote:
> "openbmc" <openbmc-bounces+austenc=us.ibm.com at lists.ozlabs.org> wrote on
> 06/08/2017 02:10:26 AM:
>
>> From: Joel Stanley <joel at jms.id.au>
>> To: Patrick Venture <venture at google.com>
>> Cc: OpenBMC Maillist <openbmc at lists.ozlabs.org>
>> Date: 06/08/2017 02:11 AM
>> Subject: Re: New Platform Guide
>> Sent by: "openbmc" <openbmc-bounces+austenc=us.ibm.com at lists.ozlabs.org>
>>
>
>> 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
>> > configuredproperly.
>> > 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
>>
>
> No better time then the present... Add/edit as you see fit.  Then we can at
> least assign some tasks out
>
> Goal for document:  Allow an experienced engineering team to port existing
> hardware to OpenBMC
> Topics:
> - Yocto Layering to support your board
> - Does your hardware have supported device drivers
> - How to deal with non hwmon supported devices

- What is the overall design of the package intercommunications?
(Effectively a dependency list -- but more explicit than the yocto
depends output)

- What services are expected or provided?
(Ties into the item below)

> - How to implement the default set of packages (thermal, inventory, ipmi, led, etc)
> - How to swapping a default package with a proprietary one
> - Adding packages
> - Testing against the OpenBMC verification suite
>
>

Patrick