reference platforms?

[Avi Fishman]

I am sending this on behalf of Uri Trichter, Nuvoton BMC project manager:

We suggest to consider a "manageability connector" on the Reference
Board such that every BMC SOC can test it's compatibility vs the
reference board functionality.
We understand, this doesn’t resolve the different HOST systems, but,
the focus of this group is BMC and therefore we see value in the
proposal.

In recent OCP summit,  a concept project called RunBMC presented this idea.
We analyzed RunBMC proposal and think that their functional signal
coverage is good, but the connector selected is less practical.
So, we are looking to define an SO-DIMM based edge connector that
contain similar++  functional signals in a usable form factor.

If OpenBMC form, will decide to go with a reference platform +
manageability connector on MB, we will make this specification
available for comments.

On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 8:40 PM, Brad Bishop
<bradleyb at fuzziesquirrel.com> wrote:
> I think in the not-too-distant-future we are going to need a concept of reference
> platforms.
>
> openbmc/openbmc is essentially the same thing as Poky.  A super-repo
> of other upstream repos (bitbake, oe-core, etc…).  Our upstream repos
> just happen to be different things like poky, meta-virtualization, meta-phosphor,
> meta-aspeed, etc.
>
> But the similarity ends when you look at the platforms supported.  Poky
> has a set of reference platforms.  Any other platforms or distros using
> Poky are not the Yocto projects concern - they are completely maintained
> by the project that uses Poky (like us!).
>
> Thus far we have not really put any filter on what machines you get
> when you clone openbmc/openbmc.  I think that needs to change to a model
> like the one the Yocto project uses.  The clear benefits I see to that
> are:
>
> - It addresses a scaling problem in the openbmc/openbmc repository.  We
> are on track to repeat the mistakes of the openembedded project that led
> to the formation of Poky in the first place.  That is, we cannot add new
> platform and BSP layers indefinitely.  At some point it will become
> unmanageable.  Part of me wonders if we are already there.
>
> - Testing.  Obviously a developer cannot test a patch on 100 platforms or
> 10 different SOCs.  So what is the developer expected to test on?  A reference
> platform.  Then who tests the other systems?  The maintainers of those
> systems.  Adopting the same mode of thinking as Poky makes this distinction
> clear.
>
> So what does everyone think of the idea of reference platforms?  Can
> they help the OpenBMC project?
>
> So the obvious next question is…what are the metrics for defining reference
> platforms?  I predict finding the answer to that will be a challenge :-).
>
> Go ahead and throw crazy ideas out there.  Pay money to the project?  Most
> days without a compile failure?  There are about a million things we could
> do here - but what does everyone find fair?
>
> thx - brad