I need to build an OpenBMC image for a Portwell Neptune card ...

[Patrick Williams]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 08:00:14AM -0500, James Hatt wrote:
> Dear OpenBMC,
> I’ve been handed the *opportunity* of building OpenBMC for the Portwell
> Neptune circuit card. Of course, Portwell is no help whatever.
> 
> I am new to OpenBMC. I’ve built Yocto Petalinux machines before. So I have
> a little knowledge of Yocto. I’ve lots of experience with Linux and
> embedded systems.
> 
> Where would I start?
> 
> BTW, I was able to clone the OpenBMC repository and build the phosphor
> target without error. When I attempt to build meta-portwell/meta-neptune, I
> get errors early with bitbake. Since the Portwell literature boasts of
> Facebook OpenBMC, I tried their branch and that failed to build also.
> 
> Help!
> ---jjh
> 
> *James Hatt |* *Sr. Software Developer*

Hi James,

I'm probably the best to respond to this even though I know almost
nothing about Portwell/Neptune.

Facebook OpenBMC is not a branch / fork of the Linux Foundation OpenBMC.
They are entirely different code bases with almost no commonality.
Facebook OpenBMC started first, but the community has coalesced around
the LF-OpenBMC.

It sounds like the Neptune port to facebook/openbmc was a project done
by some engineers at Facebook with little involvement from Portwell.
You'll see the initial commit was from a Facebook engineer and there has
not been any further contributions beyond minor cleanups to keep it
compiling by Facebook.  This work was done ~3 years ago and is not a
fully formed product.

The openbmc/openbmc meta-portwell was also done by a Facebook engineer
about 2 years ago.  The content seems to be just the bare essentials to
get a basic kernel and openbmc/openbmc image booting on the BMC.  There
is really no support code beyond that.

I think it would be good to understand what it is you're trying to
accomplish with the device.  I could do some small amount of work to get
either facebook/openbmc or openbmc/openbmc compiling for you.  If you'd
like to get this integrated into a real project we should probably
discuss what the needs are, but I likely you'll need to handle a
significant part of the contribution there.

-- 
Patrick Williams
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/openbmc/attachments/20201016/ad0ba82f/attachment.sig>