Initial MCTP design proposal

[Deepak Kodihalli]

On 08/03/19 1:05 AM, Ed Tanous wrote:
> 
> 
> On 3/7/19 12:46 AM, Deepak Kodihalli wrote:
>>
>> I agree to this as well. I've got two PLDM stacks on my laptop
>> (requester and responder) talking to each other over libmctp (over the
>> serial binding - making use of fifos instead of an actual serial
>> connection). I'd like to push a couple small commits to libmctp as well
>> (I made a PR for one of them at the moment).
> This is one thing I've wondered before about the way PLDM is being built
> out.  Testing the implementation against itself doesn't really test the
> correctness of it, unless you're creating a bunch of asserts on data
> structure elements, and even then, it just tests that you're giving what
> you expect, not that you faithfully implemented the spec.
> 
> Do you plan to run this implementation against something other than
> itself to test at some point?  If so, what device/implementation are you
> planning to target?

BMC to host communications over MCTP, over different physical channels 
(LPC for eg), is one of the first goals. There are more details in the 
PLDM/MCTP design docs that Jeremy and I had sent out.

The test that I described above was to integrate the PLDM stack with 
libmctp and see how that goes, without having to wait for another device 
implementation to be ready. I think this is a logical step towards 
employing PLDM/MCTP for device-device communication. The PLDM daemon 
will link with the MCTP libs, eventually.

Regards,
Deepak