Hello to OpenBMC Team

[Brad Bishop]

On Thu, 2020-06-04 at 17:36 +0000, Verdun, Jean-Marie wrote:
> Hi Brad,
> 
> I realize that we are not in the best condition. We faced multiple
> challenges before being able to arrive to such stage. The first one is
> a chicken and egg issue, related to the need to create some momentum
> inside HPE to be able to start working on a project like OpenBMC. To
> reach it we had to create a Proof of Concept, which needed that we
> worked on our GXP asic support and introduce patches into the original
> source tree that we forked. At the PoC level, we still could have
> ended up into a situation where we would have dropped the work.
> 
> We used that PoC to demonstrate the value of OpenBMC on top of our
> hardware to public and private customers, leading to a green light to
> join the project. 
> 
> I know very well the pain to maintain a fork of a project, and I
> believe most of the HPE team also. We will work pretty hard at the
> early stage of the project to upstream what is needed just to be sure
> that we do not end up into a complex situation. My ideal goal is
> always to commit upstream instead into a fork, and I share your
> concerns. We will probably have a rollercoaster ride at the beginning
> due to the amount of code to introduce, but we are ready to adapt to
> the community needs.
> 
> I do contribute to other projects like FreeCAD, which are huge piece
> of code, and maintain the snap of it. So forking is never a good idea,
> except if you want to build a separate project, which is clearly not
> our intend ! We want to be part of this community, and make its
> software works properly on our systems.

Great!  It sounds like we are on the same page and I'm glad you were
able to build the momentum necessary to get here.

> We do have an alpha loan program which will start soon also, and we
> would like to support it "publicaly" allowing its members to rebuild
> openbmc and linuxboot image from code which are available on github,
> this also explain the tight schedule we follow.
> 
> Last but not least, I am trying to automatize as much as we can, build
> and testing on HPE hardware through our public interactive CI which is
> under active development. The tool intend to take as an input a github
> repo, a branch and build a functional openbmc/linuxboot image as an
> output which will be automatically ran on a live hardware machine. It
> is available on https://osfci.tech and 
> https://github.com/hewlettpackard/osfci. The code is still a lot
> buggy, but I am progressing on a daily basis.
> 
> One of the main advantage of it, is that you do not need to be seated
> closed to real hardware to test on real hardware. I have also included
> a build machine with a lot of core and memory, so we could batch build
> images. If needed we could try to find a way to share it as a build
> systems into OpenBMC Jenkins.

This sounds exciting.  Public, automated testing on real hardware would
be a great addition.

> By the way Brad, do you think we could create a meta-hpe into the tree
> ?

Yes.  meta-hpe created.

-brad