OpenBMC : FRU Inventory management

[Ed Tanous]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 8:14 PM Vasant Patil <vasantp at nvidia.com> wrote:
>
>
> We are enabling OpenBMC on x86 system. We would like to know the recommendation on FRU inventory management and corresponding pointers.
>
> There seems to be multiple options available
>
> described in  “Adding new system to OpenBMC” with  Yaml files (meta-romulus/recipes-phosphor/ipmi)
> Entity manager  with JSON schema
>
> We are looking to enable below inventory (Both FRU and non-FRU):
>
> CPU
> DIMM
> M.2
> U.2
> Motherboard FRU EEPROM
> Chassis FRU EEPROM
> Add-on PCI cards
> FANs
> PSU
> Etc.
>
>

I'm chuckling to myself a little bit here;  When we originally
designed entity manager, "GPU that comes in a green box" was
definitely one of the first example entity config files that we wrote
up to make sure the configs were expressive enough.  In short,
welcome!  Glad to have you here.

If the above is your requirements list, presumably you need runtime
configurability for the things plugged into the slots and ports.
Given that constraint, entity manager (+ dbus-sensors and
phosphor-pid-control) is probably the way to go, and is the way most
newer platforms seem to be trending.  Based on your requirements, I'm
going to guess you're building a platform that looks a lot like a Wolf
Pass.  I'd probably start with those config files, as it has all of
the features you list above, as well as backplanes, which you didn't
explicitly list, and should give you a good starting point to begin
your development.