Using bios-settings-mgr for setting hypervisor network attributes

[Brad Bishop]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 05:38:32PM +0530, Deepak Kodihalli wrote:
>To add to this, from a PLDM perspective, we plan to send up the 
>hypervisor network config properties to the host as BIOS attributes.

Would we need to hide these from a future redfish bios settings schema 
implementation?

>There isn't a PLDM network config schema. The PLDM daemon talks to the 
>new bios-settings-mgr app to find BIOS properties that have been 
>updated out of band. The Redfish schema we plan to use here is 
>EthernetInterface though, and not the Redfish BIOS schema. All this is 
>causing a need for some conversion layers.
>
>My initial thought was bmcweb can update the BIOS backend store that's 
>implemented by the bios-settings-mgr, but it looks like Patrick and Ed 
>have concerns with that approach. I think I agree their reasoning, but 
>at the same time I don't think there should be special code in the 
>PLDM daemon (timers/special knowledge about a set of BIOS 
>attributes/special BIOS attribute which indicates other BIOS 
>attributes have been updated/etc) for this, and this should be 
>processed like any other BIOS attribute that the PLDM daemon deals 
>with. This implies these attributes should also make it to the store 
>that bios-settings-mgr owns (that likely means an additional D-Bus 
>hop). So, another option (proposal 4) could be an intermediate app 
>that accumulates (for eg by means of watching the 'Enabled' property 
>that's in the Object.Enable interface; the hypervisor settings object 
>would have to additionally implement this interface) the hypervisor 
>network config property updates, and then provides these as key-value 
>pairs to the bios-settings-mgr app.

I get the feeling this option 4 might have been overlooked because it 
was buried in this long thread.  Anyone care to weigh in on this as an 
option?