Romulus to use Virtual PNOR

[Alexander Amelkin]

06.02.2019 3:39, Stewart Smith wrote:
> Alexander Amelkin <a.amelkin at yadro.com> writes:
>> 25.01.2019 10:40, Lei YU wrote:
>>> This email is to notify that Romulus is going to use VirtualPNOR feature, if
>>> no objections are received.
>>>
>>> ...
>>>
>>> Any objections?
>> Well, the main concern is how it will affect vesnin, which is P8-based (like palmetto).
>>
>> All this virtual PNOR functionality is based on mbox/hiomap, which is
>> not supported for P8 in openpower firmware.
> For various reasons, this is now changing, so you'll be able to do hiomap
> on P8.

Could you please elaborate on this? Some GitHub issues or discussion threads anywhere?

The problem as we see it is that P8 must be supported everywhere throughout op-build components.
Even if there was no support in hostboot for hiomap being added, we could be able to add it ourselves. But that still wouldn't work with SBE, as while the SBE sources for P8 are public, they nonetheless require a proprietary toolchain to build that, I quote the README.md, "cannot be open-sourced". The op-build framework takes pre-built SBE binaries for P8.

Anyway, if hiomap support is indeed being added for P8, we'd love to know more about it.

>
>> As a result, we suspect that palmetto and (what concerns us most)
>> vesnin will lose firmware update support completely.
> I think this is a valid concern, and I'd be concerned if there's tight
> coupling between VPNOR and the firmware update APIs.

So far it looks to me like there is such tight coupling.

Thanks.

Alexander.


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