Out-of-band NIC management

[Ben Wei]

> On Tue, 16 Jul 2019 at 21:46, Ben Wei <benwei at fb.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Would anyone be interested in collaborating on out-of-band NIC management and monitoring?
> >
> > DMTF has as a NCSI spec (https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.dmtf.org_sites_default_files_standards_documents_DSP0222-> 5F1.1.0.pdf&d=DwIBaQ&c=5VD0RTtNlTh3ycd41b3MUw&r=U35IaQ-7Tnwjs7q_Fwf_bQ&m=lXSq8KYmN6_5__0s64ulIMwH5bwqJQjM2d-IqHL7kcw&s=L-> c3XEEs7crMHpKscqEdHYKM8fRR2xHM9NkQdfohAcU&e= ), that defines a standard interface for BMCs to manage NICs.
> > And in kernel 5.x , NC-SI driver supports Netlink interface for communicating with userspace processes.
> >
> > I'm thinking adding the following tools to OpenBMC as a starting point and build form there:
> >
> >       1. A command line utility (e.g. ncsi-util) to send raw NC-SI commands, useful for debugging and initial NIC bring up,
> >       For example:
> >           ncsi-util -eth0 -ch 0 <raw NC-SI command>
>
> The NCSI kernel maintainer, Sam, has written a tool that fits this descirption:
>
>  https://github.com/sammj/ncsi-netlink

Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for!
One question on this, do you plan add some command-specific parsing.  Especially for commands like get version ID,  capability & parameters, and various statistics. I think these are especially useful for initial NIC bring up and debugging.

Regards,
-Ben