Read Firmware Versions

[Lei Yu]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 9:40 AM Vijay Khemka <vijaykhemka at fb.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 9/23/20, 1:19 PM, "openbmc on behalf of Adriana Kobylak" <openbmc-bounces+vijaykhemka=fb.com at lists.ozlabs.org on behalf of anoo at linux.ibm.com> wrote:
>
>     On 2020-09-23 10:35, Patrick Williams wrote:
>     > On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 01:34:50PM +0000, Jayashree D wrote:
>     >> Classification: HCL Internal
>     >>
>     >> Thanks Patrick for your response.
>     >>
>     >> In phosphor-bmc-code-mgmt, I am seeing the software image is upgraded
>     >> and based on the image update, version is updated.
>     >> But in my platform, I have to read firmware versions using oem
>     >> commands and that version should be displayed under dbus objects.
>     >> Whether phosphor-bmc-code-mgmt repo will be suitable to display the
>     >> firmware version using dbus objects?
>     >
>     > Vijay recently added a simple BIOS flash management to
>     > phosphor-bmc-code-mgmt, but there is also a openpower-pnor-code-mgmt
>     > for
>     > the equivalent of BIOS management on openpower systems.  Since your
>     > code
>     > update scheme is likely to be specific to your IPMB commands, I don't
>     > know if that would be best in a separate repository or an extension
>     > onto
>     > phosphor-bmc-code-mgmt.
>     >
>     > Adriana, any opinions?
>
>     It could fit in phosphor-bmc-code-mgmt, some thoughts:
>
>     The d-bus objects get created at 2 different times:
>
>     1. One scenario is when an image is uploaded to be updated, this is the
>     support that Vijay added which allows a custom script to be run to
>     update the BIOS image. If you're interested in this method for updating
>     your BIOS, you could potentially add your IPMB commands in that service
>     and use the Activation interfaces to drive the update.
>
>     2. The second scenario is when the BMC reboots and it recreates the
>     d-bus objects. For this scenario, there's no currently support for BIOS,
>     so for example the support that Vijay added does not create a d-bus
>     interface if the BMC reboots, which is ok if you only want to use the
>     Activation interface to trigger the update. But sounds like you want to
>     always have the version information as a d-bus object, so support for
>     BIOS could be added. For example, to get the BMC levels, the code looks
>     for version information in the BMC in the media directory. If you get
>     your app to get the version information via the oem commands you
>     mentioned and create a file in the bmc in the media directory we could
>     extend the logic to create the Version d-bus objects for each BIOS
>     version when the BMC reboots. We'd just need to work out the details for
>     the format for the files that would host the version information, and
>     how to identify they're BIOS versions vs BMC.
>
> I already create a file after reading bios version via oem commands, Is there
> a pattern where should we keep this file and what is the name of file. Also
> I thought there is a dbus interface for bios management already created by
> some daemon newly added which can keep bios version.
>

We plan to do something like this:
1. The BIOS version is stored in an eeprom;
2. On BMC boot, phosphor-bmc-code-mgmt creates the bios object, and
fill the version read from the eeprom;
3. When the host is started, BIOS sends its version via OEM ipmi command;
4. BMC will update and write the version to the eeprom if the version
is different.

-- 
BRs,
Lei YU