Initial MCTP design proposal

[Deepak Kodihalli]

On 08/03/19 10:28 AM, Deepak Kodihalli wrote:
> 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.


Also, the application was not tested against itself. The application is 
mostly a responder now. It was tested against a requester 
implementation. This commit chain might help clarify : 
https://gerrit.openbmc-project.xyz/#/c/openbmc/pldm/+/19011/

>> 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
>