Human readable POST code messages

[Patrick Williams]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 07:42:47AM -0400, Oskar Senft wrote:
> Hi Brad
> 
> I had thought about this before. The main issue I found is that the meaning
> of the POST code messages are highly dependent on the particular platform
> (i.e. BIOS) emitting them, i.e. there's no generic mapping that's always
> correct.
> 
> Having said that, given that there are only a limited number of BIOS
> vendors, it might be possible to generate a few lists and make the BIOS
> vendor a config option to select the right mapping.
> 
> What's your use case?

I would like to know more about the underlying use-case.  How do you
intend to expose these?  Is this "WithMessage" usable for Redfish and
the WebUI or is it only for internal use by CLI tools?

I think a bigger question is how we handle translation.  I think it is a
bad direction to have individual processes providing "human consumable"
strings because you need to translate them at some point.  We maybe
should look at a message registry design of some sort that can help
facilitate translation.

Putting very little thought behind it, we might want to define some kind
of interface (ex. MessageRegistry) with a method:

    Message(language, interface, property, value) -> string

> On Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 7:23 AM Brad Chou <bradc at hyvedesignsolutions.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > Is it possible to implement an interface that decode each post code into a
> > manful string ?
> >
> > For example, if code 0x10 is mapped to “Power-on initialization of the
> > host processor”.
> >
> > Then, in the
> > phosphor-dbus-interfaces/xyz/openbmc_project/State/Boot/PostCode.interface.yaml,
> >
> > We have the GetPostCodes method, that can return the post codes “0x10”.
> >
> > Can we add another method GetPostCodesWithMessage to return the post code
> > 0x10 and its human readable message “Power-on initialization of the host
> > processor” ?
> >
> >
> >
> > Thanks.
> >

-- 
Patrick Williams
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