Implement Ethernet Interface Properties

[Ed Tanous]

On Wed, Dec 1, 2021 at 1:59 AM Spencer Ku (古世瑜) <Spencer.Ku at quantatw.com> wrote:
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> Hi All,
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> We want to implement two network Ethernet interface properties “Bandwidth” and “Drop package rate”, and expose the information via Redfish. The goal is that clients can talk to bmc via Redfish and get those two information. It will improve the debuggability of BMCs.
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The only thing I would note in your plan is that Redfish generally
doesn't expose anything as a "rate", it exposes it as a count (packet
count, drop count), and lets the client determine whatever sampling
rate they want.  I suspect you should do the same.

Also, I'm assuming "drop package rate" was a typo for "dropped packets rate"?

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> About the implement method, we divide the work into two parts: phosphor-network(or other suitable service) part, and bmcweb part.
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> For phosphor-network part, we propose to use existing tool like ipert to get the Ethernet BW/Drop package rate. Or the other method is that read TX/RX from ethernet driver (/sys/class/net/{Ethernet_Name}), then calculate the BW/Drop package rate. After that, we will need to register the D-Bus interface and sync the property info to that D-Bus.
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> For bmcweb part, as I know so far, there has no suitable field under the EthernetInterface to set BW/Drop package rate. The idea is that read the value from D-bus then set the properties under the EthernetInterface OEM field. Please let me know if I have missed anything.

Considering that not all NICs will have this telemetry, it probably
makes sense to have it on a separate dbus interface.

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> We are willing to see any suggestions and alternatives as well. Thanks!
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> Sincerely,
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> Spencer Ku