In-band IPMI Update over IPMI Blobs
Patrick Venture
venture at google.com
Sat Oct 6 00:44:37 AEST 2018
For those who have been watching, we have been upstreaming how we
currently handle in-band updates over IPMI/LPC/PCI to
phosphor-ipmi-flash. However, recently we also upstreamed a generic
blob interface, phosphor-ipmi-blobs. Until
https://gerrit.openbmc-project.xyz/13620 it wasn't a suitable
mechanism for the firmware update due to an inability to do a clean
method mapping between the protocols.
I've written up a proposal (downstream for now) to port the
phosphor-ipmi-flash implementation into a blob handler that just goes
through phosphor-ipmi-blobs. The thinking is to have more things
leverage the generic blob handler instead of having a fully separate
OEM IPMI command set for everything (although phosphor-ipmi-flash goes
over the Firmware Netfn).
It's now a pretty trivial transformation, and once the design has some
age downstream (1-2 days :D), then I'm going to send it here for
review.
Unless there are obvious objections.
And as food for thought, other Blob protocol use-cases in the works:
- mechanism for downloading core dumps and crash logs over IPMI (no
network access)
- mechanism for sending commands down for special hardware
- mechanism for reading back configuration files for whitelisted debug
- mechanism for randomly creating large files such that the flash
fills up and the system never boots again.
Patrick
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