An IPMI Request Visualization Tool

[Andrew Jeffery]

On Thu, 14 May 2020, at 23:27, Patrick Williams wrote:
> On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 03:38:47PM -0700, Sui Chen wrote:
> > We're working on a GUI tool that allows the user to capture and visualize
> > BMC IPMI requests.
> > 
> > The tool accepts 2 kinds of inputs:
> >  1) Load a DBus traffic dump file generated by dbus-monitor on the BMC
> >  2) Capture IPMI requests on the BMC -- the tool connects to the BMC
> > console by launching a program of the the user's choice (example: ssh or
> > telnet), then starts "dbus-monitor" on the BMC and checks its outputs for DBus
> > calls on the IPMI daemon and then draws the IPMI requests on the canvas
> > accordingly.
>  
> > A screenshot is attached to illustrate what it does:
> > [image: scrnshot_compressed.png]
> 
> Neat.  I wonder if we can use this to analyse dbus messages with high
> amounts of latency (especially once that are infrequently latent) in
> order to better target which processes we should move towards async
> calls.

For what it's worth I have a script for parsing D-Bus pcaps:

https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc-tools/tree/master/amboar/obmc-scripts/dbus-pcap

It's helped me tracked down unexpected latencies and other weird
behaviours in the past.

I've just pushed a change adding a README to introduce the capabilities
and provide examples of usage and output:

https://gerrit.openbmc-project.xyz/c/openbmc/openbmc-tools/+/32583

Cheers,

Andrew