Proposal for pldmtool

[Tom Joseph]

Hi All,

I wanted to put down initial thoughts on "pldmtool" which is a utility 
for controlling PLDM enabled devices. The naming of the utility was 
influenced by ipmitool which is a client utility to control IPMI enabled 
devices. The pldmtool acts as the requester and sends the PLDM message 
to target any PLDM enabled device. The PLDM response message is 
processed and expressed in human readable format.  This proposal needs 
to be considered on the basis of the pldm design 
(https://github.com/openbmc/docs/blob/master/designs/pldm-stack.md). 
These are possible pldmtool usage scenarios.

* pldmtool can run on OpenBMC and can target the PLDM daemon. PLDM 
daemon will have a D-Bus interface to accept PLDM requests.
* pldmtool can target other management controllers connected to BMC 
implementing PLDM stacks.
* A provision to run pldmtool targeting OpenBMC over a custom network 
port and route the request to the PLDM daemon.

These are the some of the salient features in the pldmtool that

* Provide user friendly command options
* Debug options to print detailed PLDM messages.
* Leverage libmctp and libpldm library getting developed for 
communicating with MCTP layer and for encoding/decoding PLDM messages. 
(https://github.com/openbmc/pldm, https://github.com/jk-ozlabs/libmctp)

The host firmware stacks typically have runtime constraints. If there is 
interest in having pldmtool run on host firmware then pldmtool will have 
to be written in C. Apart from this consideration the natural choice 
will be to develop this in modern C++.

This mail is a feeler to seek the interests of the community. I will be 
keen to follow-up this with a design template.

Thanks,
Tom