Read FRU of host through ipmi in Entity manager.

[Ed Tanous]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 9:44 AM Kumar Thangavel <thangavel.k at hcl.com> wrote:
>
> Classification: HCL Internal
>
> Hi All,
>
>             Thanks for your comments and suggestions.
>
>             As suggested, we are planning to implement a new process/service like  xyz.openbmc_project.IPMB.FruDevice in entity manager module to support Host FRU through ipmb rather than using dbus-sensors/ipmbsensors file.
>
>             Following are the advantages, if host FRU handling in entity manager repo.
>
>             1. All the FRU information is handling in the same repo.

But IPMB information is bifurcated in your plan.  Ideally, Fru-Device
wouldn't even be in the entity-manager repo, it's there now just as an
artifact of the history of how it was built.

>             2. Entity manager Probe can work.

I'm not understanding this;  Entity manager probes can work regardless
of where the code is checked in.

>             3. All the FRU Functions are in the same repo. We can try to reuse most of the functions.

This is a valid point.  Maybe some of the functions need abstracted
out into their own libraries?


>             4. Adding Fru object to dbus handling are done.

I'm not following this point.  Are you saying that code wouldn't need
duplicated?

>             5. All FRU validations are done here like Format fru, update fru property, validate header, Fru AreaLen and checksum. We can try to reuse those validations.

See previous point about "maybe we need a library".

>
>             For scanning the /dev/ipmi-* nodes, we are thinking to use ipmb-channels.json cofig entries in entity manager repo since this config file has valid slave path and bus address.


It should be noted, there's going to need to be significantly more
code added to be able to scan and parse the SDR.  I'm assuming that
code alone will be larger than FruDevice is today.