phosphor-ipmi-flash state recovery

[Patrick Venture]

On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 3:57 PM Patrick Voelker
<Patrick_Voelker at phoenix.com> wrote:
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> Do you have a timeline for upstreaming your changes?
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> 10 minutes seems rather excessive for a session timeout.  I’d prefer to see it set to something more like 30 seconds except for the update process itself if it involves writing to flash.
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> Alternately, what would you think of this option?
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> ·         Add a ‘force’ command line override to burn_my_bmc that would cause it to attempt to obtain the current SessionID and do a close on it if the specified image is already active.
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> ·         On the BMC side, I’d need to a method to obtain the session ID for a blob. It’d have been perfect to return that in BmcBlobStat’s response but maybe a new command called BmcBlobSession would be appropriate?
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> From: William Kennington [mailto:wak at google.com]
> Sent: Friday, May 22, 2020 3:15 PM
> To: Patrick Voelker
> Cc: OpenBMC (openbmc at lists.ozlabs.org); Patrick Venture; Benjamin Fair
> Subject: Re: phosphor-ipmi-flash state recovery
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> I was working on a change to fix this a couple of weeks ago and implement the needed expiry / cancellation mechanisms to make everything happy. Right now the easiest thing you can is reset the BMC or just the ipmi daemon.
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> On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 3:06 PM Patrick Voelker <Patrick_Voelker at phoenix.com> wrote:
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> When running burn_my_bmc, if I exit the program during image upload with ctrl-c, it seems that the bmc gets left in a state that is difficult to recover from.
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> When attempting to run the update again I can see that the /flash/active/image blob is present.  burn_my_bmc opens the cleanup blob, commits it, and then closes it but the state doesn’t change. I don’t have the cleanup-delete option enabled but it doesn’t look like that cleans up the state anyhow.
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> Internally, it looks like I need to get to abortProcess() but to do that I need to close the current session but I don’t have a way to obtain the sessionID after the fact.  Also the stale session doesn’t seem to expire (as mentioned in the readme.md) and I can’t find the support for that in the code.

https://github.com/openbmc/phosphor-ipmi-flash/blob/master/bmc/firmware_handler.cpp#L95

You should be able to just delete any of the blob Id paths, such as
the active blob path, and that should trigger what you want.

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> Can you give me a pointer on the best known way to recover from this scenario without rebooting the BMC?
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