Packaging and deploying multiple firmware image types in one

[Alexander A. Filippov]

On Mon, Nov 11, 2019 at 01:28:11PM -0600, Adriana Kobylak wrote:
> There was some discussion in the "PSU firmware update" proposal[1] about
> bundling firmware images together such as the BMC and PSU firmware. The
> Software interface defines these bundles as a "System" version[2].
> 
> At IBM, we're starting to create a "System" bundle of BMC + host firmware by
> adding a recipe that would add the host's firmware files to the BMC's
> squashfs[3].
> 
> One of the pending items is determining how to showcase the version of these
> System images in Redfish. We can assume that the version of a System image
> corresponds to the BMC's "FirmwareVersion", but it's unknown what else the
> bundle contains (host fw, PSU fw, PCIe fw,..), in order to populate the
> other version fields such as "BiosVersion". There's a D-Bus "Extended
> Version" property[4] that could be leveraged to add the additional image
> information.
> 
> Feel free to share if you have any thoughts on this item or any aspect of
> these "System" images.
> 

We use the system bundle of BMC + Host firmware on our VESNIN hardware.
There are some things which cause discomfort a little bit:
- The uploaded system bundle isn't shown in the WebUI.
- The system bundle has only one version field which is common for BMC and Host
  firmwares.
- After rebooting BMC, which is required to complete update the BMC firmware
  the system bundle turns to two separated instances in D-Bus which has its own
  real versions.

Thus, I thought about putting the separate manifests for each part of the
bundle.

> 
> ---
> [1] https://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/openbmc/2019-June/016573.html
> [2] https://github.com/openbmc/phosphor-dbus-interfaces/blob/master/xyz/openbmc_project/Software/Version.interface.yaml
> [3] https://github.com/openbmc/meta-openpower/blob/master/recipes-phosphor/flash/host-fw_git.bb
> [4] https://github.com/openbmc/phosphor-dbus-interfaces/blob/master/xyz/openbmc_project/Software/ExtendedVersion.interface.yaml