When building OpenBMC . . . ?

[Patrick Williams]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2020 at 10:02:41PM +0000, Bruce Mitchell wrote:
> When selecting Target hardware https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc#3-target-your-hardware
> to build for the is a tiogapass, now if I add a meta-phoenix/meta-tiogapass/conf  how does
> 	source setup tiogapass build
> know which tiogapass to build?

https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc/blob/master/setup#L34

The setup script just does a wildcard, which means you'll get the
alphabetically ordered machine.  In this case, you should get the
meta-facebook one selected before the meta-phoenix (supposing they both
exist).

> Or am I not supposed to choose a name (i.e. tiogapass in this example) that is already in the list
> when I need to create a new meta-phoenix/meta-<machine>/conf?

The overwhelming preference seems to be to not make another
configuration with the same machine, and as one of the maintainers of
meta-facebook, I agree in this case.  But, this answer doesn't solve
your underlying question.

I suspect you're going to make two kinds of changes:
  1. Features you want to enable on Tiogapass that Facebook isn't
     interested in.  (I would cover bmcweb 'branding' changes here
     also).
  2. Fixes and configuration due to features we haven't enabled yet or
     fully vetted.

#2 should go into either meta-facebook (or the underlying code
repository where the fix is needed).  These will be common for any
tiogapass hardware, so lets keep it in the common location.

#1 should go into meta-phoenix.  You're likely the first one doing this,
so we may need some experimentation on the best option.  I have two
ideas (there are probably others):

  * Make an alternative tiogapass variant, like tiogapass-phoenix, which
    ends up including all the common tiogapass code from meta-facebook.

  * Create a new distro type for phoenix, which enhances the underlying
    openbmc distribution with your own branding tweaks.  You'd still
    build meta-facebook/tiogapass but with a different distro flavor.

I believe IBM has experiemented with both of these approaches for
witherspoon (see witherspoon-tacoma and
meta-ibm/conf/distro/openbmc-witherspoon.conf) and might have some
insight into what has worked well for them.

I'm more than willing to work with you and your team to help refactor
meta-facebook/tiogapass in a way that makes it more condusive to what
your team is interested in doing.  I suspect we'll need to create some
additional bitbake '.inc' files and move some of the content we have in
'.conf' to '.inc'.  Catch me here or on IRC as needed.

-- 
Patrick Williams
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