Request for Feedback :: Time Mode setting in timemanager

[Vishwanatha Subbanna]

On deferring consuming the updates to Manual/NTP settings, so far, some of the customers have expressed dislike for this design. We don’t have this design in the traditional systems. What we have tho is that we don’t allow setting the time on BMC when the system power is on.  In a way, that behavior kind of matches with deferring the updates to Manual / NTP when the system power is on with the BMC based systems.

We are having this discussion internally. This mail was to see what the community feels about those settings.

Proposal for now is to:  *Remove the support for TimeOwner*. It will be as good as BOTH

Once I have some concrete data from the internal discussion, I will come back on the Manual/NTP settings.

Thanks,
!! Vishwa !!

> On 20-Feb-2020, at 10:03 PM, Patrick Williams <patrick at stwcx.xyz> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Feb 19, 2020 at 12:07:06PM +0530, Vishwanatha Subbanna wrote:
>> Thanks for the good discussion on this.
>> 
>> Patrick, I see you mentioned the TimeOwner in your response. TimeOwner was
>> another thing that was disliked by the users and I had sent an email couple
>> months ago asking if anyone still needs it. I did not see anyone saying they
>> need. I then proposed removing TimeOwner feature.
>> 
>> So, if we want to make it simpler, we would want to:
>> 
>> - Remove TimeOwner concept
>> - Remove the deferred updates to Manual / NTP settings.
>> 
>> Please let me know if you see anything that might be affected by this ?.
> 
> I tried to provide history as best as I recollect, mostly to be helpful.
> 
> As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Facebook servers use a
> Host-owned RTC.  Unless someone can speak to non-Power servers that have
> a BMC-owned RTC, this might only affect IBM(*).  You'll need to decide what
> impact removing this feature may have to you and your customers.
> 
> If you'd like to put together a proposal and seek feedback on what the
> potential side effects for specific customer classes might be, I can
> certainly do that, but right now I don't really have enough information
> on what the "new" design would be just from those two bullets.
> 
> (*) - And OpenPower.
> -- 
> Patrick Williams