PECI API?

[Rick Altherr]

On Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 2:50 PM, Jae Hyun Yoo
<jae.hyun.yoo at linux.intel.com> wrote:
>
> >> On Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 9:26 AM, Jae Hyun Yoo <jae.hyun.yoo at linux.intel.com> wrote:
> >>>> On Oct 23, 2017, at 1:03 PM, Jae Hyun Yoo <jae.hyun.yoo at linux.intel.com> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Hi Dave,
> >>>>
> >>>> I'm currently working on PECI kernel driver
> >>>
> >>> I'm curious about the high level structure.  I'm sure others are as well.
> >>> Anything you can share would be informative and appreciated!
> >>>
> >>> A couple questions that popped into my head:
> >>>
> >>>  - Would there be a new Linux bus type or core framework for this?
> >>>  - How many drivers would there be for a full stack.  Something like this?
> >>>      - client? (hwmon, for example)
> >>>      - core? (common code)
> >>>      - bmc specific implementation? (aspeed, nuvoton, emulated
> >>> differences)
> >>>  - Have you considered using DT bindings and/or how they would look?
> >>>
> >>> These questions are motivated by the recent upstreaming experience
> >>> with FSI (flexible support interface) where a similar structure was used.
> >>> FSI on POWER feels similar to PECI in terms of usage and features so
> >>> I thought I'd just throw this out there as a possible reference point to consider.
> >>
> >> PECI is using single-wired interface which is different from other
> >> popular interfaces such as I2C and MTD, and therefore it doesn't have
> >> any common core framework in kernel so I'm adding the PECI main
> >> contorl driver as an misc type and the other one into hwmon subsystem.
> >> The reason why I seperate the implementation into two drivers is, PECI
> >> can be used not only for temperature monitoring but also for platform
> >> manageability, processor diagnostics and failure analysis, so the misc
> >> control driver will be used as a common PECI driver for all those
> >> purposes flexibly and the hwmon subsystem driver will use the common
> >> PECI driver just for temperature monitoring. These drivers will be BMC
> >> specific implementation which support Aspeed shipset only. Support for
> >> Nuvoton chipset was not considered in my implementation because
> >> Nuvoton has different HW and register scheme, also Nuvoton already has
> >> its dedicated driver implementation in hwmon subsystem for their each
> >> chipset variant (nct6683.c  nct6775.c  nct7802.c).
> >>
> >
> > Nuvoton is starting to submit support for their Poleg BMC to upstream
> > (http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2017-October/538226.html).
> > This BMC includes a PECI controller similar to the Aspeed design but
> > with a different register layout.  At a minimum, the misc driver needs
> > to support multiple backend drivers to allow Nuvoton to implement the same
> > interface.  The chips you listed that are already in hwmon are for
> > Nuvoton's SuperIOs, not their BMCs.
> >
>
> Thanks for your pointing out of the current Poleg BMC upstreaming. I didn't know about that before.
> Ideally, it would be great if we support all BMC PECI controllers in a single device driver
> but we should consider some dependencies such as SCU register setting in bootloader, clock setting
> for the PECI controller HW block and etc that would vary on each BMC controller chipset.
> Usually, these dependencies should be covered by kernel config and device tree settings.
> My thought is, each BMC controller should have its own PECI misc driver then we could
> selectively enable one by kernel configuration.
>

Are you expecting each BMC controller's PECI misc driver to
re-implement the device ioctls?  If I assume the misc device and ioctl
implementation are shared, I can't see how adding a subsystem would be
significantly more work.  Doing so would clarify what the boundaries
are between controller implementation and protocol behavior.

> >>>> and hwmon driver implementation. The kernel driver would provide these PECI commands as ioctls:
> >>>>
> >>>> - low-level PECI xfer command
> >>>
> >>> Would a separate 'dev' driver similar to i2c-dev make sense here?  Just thinking out loud.
> >>>
> >>
> >> Yes, drivers will be seperated into two but it's hard to say that this way is similar to i2c-dev.
> >> It would have a bit different shape.
> >>
> >
> > I'm not terribly familiar with the PECI protocol.  I'll see about getting a copy of the spec.
> > From what I can find via searches, it looks like individual nodes on the bus are addressed similar to I2C.
> > I'd expect that to be similar to how i2c-dev is structured: a kobject per master and a kobject
> > per address on the bus.  That way, drivers can be bound to individual addresses. The misc driver
> > would focus on exposing interacting with a specific address on the bus in a generic fashion.
> >
>
> As you said, it would be very useful if kernel has core bus framework like I2C, but current kernel
> doesn't have the core bus framework for PECI, and it would be a hugh project itself if we are going to
> implement one.

Really?  IBM did so for FSI and it really helped with understanding the design.

> Generally, PECI bus topology is very simple unlike I2C. Usually in a single system,
> there is only one BMC controller and it has connections with CPUs, that's all. I don't see an advantage
> of using core bus framework on this simple interface.
>

Ideally, an hwmon driver for PECI on an Intel CPU only needs to know
how to issue PECI commands to that device.  What address it is at and
how the bus delivers the command to the node are irrelevant details.
How do you plan to describe the PECI bus in a dts?  Can I use the same
dt bindings for the Intel CPU's PECI interface for both Aspeed and
Nuvoton?

> >>>> - Ping()
> >>>> - GetDIB()
> >>>> - GetTemp()
> >>>> - RdPkgConfig()
> >>>> - WrPkgConfig()
> >>>> - RdIAMSR()
> >>>> - RdPCIConfigLocal()
> >>>> - WrPCIConfigLocal()
> >>>> - RdPCIConfig()
> >>>>
> >>>> Also, through the hwmon driver, these temperature monitoring features would be provided:
> >>>>
> >>>> - Core temperature
> >>>> - DTS thermal margin (hysteresis)
> >>>> - DDR DIMM temperature
> >>>> - etc.
> >>>
> >>> Sweet!
> >>>
> >>>>
> >>>> Patches will come in to upstream when it is ready.
> >>>>
> >>>> Cheers,
> >>>> Jae
> >>>
> >>> For completeness, a port of the Aspeed SDK PECI driver was proposed in 2016 but it didn't go anywhere:
> >>>
> >>> https://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/openbmc/2016-August/004381.html
> >>>
> >>> thx - brad
> >>>
> >>
> >> My implementation is also heavily based on the Aspeed SDK driver but
> >> modified a lot to provide more suitable functionality for openbmc project. Hopefully, it could be introduced soon.
> >>
> >> thx,
> >> Jae
>