How to power on Intel x86 based CPUs

[Andrew Jeffery]

Hi Brad,

On Tue, 10 Apr 2018, at 19:35, Brad Chou wrote:
> Hi,
> I am going to power on my OEM server board with two Intel x86 CPUs. The 
> BMC chip is ASPEED 2500.
> 
> By the Intel data sheets, I just need to control a power on GPIO to 
> emulate power button behavior.
> The problems are, when I send Host State Control commands as mentioned 
> in docs/host-management.md, the journal log shows a lot of systemctl 
> errors.
> 
> Looks like it is going to start the OpenPower related host control 
> services, which only applies to PowerPC system.
> I try to modify GPIO_CONFIGS appears in skeleton recipe to match my 
> board, but I still got some other errors says pflash stuffs.

It sounds like you're building an OpenPOWER-based BMC image - this is controlled by how you set the TEMPLATECONF environment variable when sourcing the `openbmc-env` file to build (at a guess I'd say you're building for Palmetto, as it's used throughout the examples in the docs repo).

We do have support for a couple of x86 machines in the tree - your best bet is probably the Quanta 71L machine maintained by Patrick Venture:

https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc/tree/master/meta-openbmc-machines/meta-x86/meta-quanta/meta-q71l

As an aside, if you're experimenting and switching between target machines, it's probably a good idea to blow away your build/conf directory to make sure things get set up correctly when you next set TEMPLATECONF and source openbmc-env.

> 
> Because there is no documents to tell me how to customize the openbmc to 
> fit on x86 CPUs, so I am not sure the GPIO_CONFIGS in skeleton is the 
> right way or not.

Yeah, there's not a wealth of documentation on bringing up a new machine. It would be great if you could document your experience once you get there :)

Hope that helps in some way,

Andrew