An IPMI Request Visualization Tool

[Sui Chen]

Hello Andrew and Patrick,

Thanks for your interest! I'm also using dbus-pcap to track certain
issues on the BMC recently, and would like to add support for all DBus
messages to the visualization tool, making it somewhat resemble a GUI
version of dbus-pcap.
The goal would be to be able to use this tool to investigate both DBus
and IPMI. The way I plan to use it would be more similar to how I use
GPUView (full-system timeline rather than inspecting individual
packets)

If you ask how this user interface might differ from the already
existing dbus visualizers such as bustle, my answer would be: it will
present information in a way that's more relevant to the BMC, putting
a bit more focus on BMC-specific DBus messages, such as HWMon and
RedFish DBus messages, to present information in a high signal-noise
ratio way.

If this makes sense to you, can I know what might be a better way to proceed:
1) Create a change in openbmc-tools? or,
2) Create a new repository under openbmc? or
3) Create a personal/organization-managed repository and create a pull request?

Thanks,
Sui


On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 6:38 PM Andrew Jeffery <andrew at aj.id.au> wrote:
>
>
>
> 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