Redfish BIOS vs. PLDM BIOS

[Deepak Kodihalli]

Forgot to copy the list.

On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 1:16 PM Deepak Kodihalli
<deepak.kodihalli.83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Andrew,
>
> On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 10:35 PM Andrew Geissler <geissonator at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > We at IBM ran into an issue recently around BIOS entries.
> >
> > We have a PLDM BIOS entry, pvm_stop_at_standby, which is used to tell the host
> > whether it should stop in a setup/standby state or continue to boot all the
> > way up to the operating systems.
> >
> > We had identified a Redfish API[1] that fit with this function and mapped that
> > API to a D-Bus property which was then used by PLDM to fill in this BIOS
> > attribute.
> >
> > Recently though we've been working on incorporating the bios-settings-mgr into
> > our code and into PLDM. That provides a generic Redfish API for setting these
> > BIOS values using key,value pairs.
> >
> > The issue is that we now have a BIOS value, pvm_stop_at_standby, defined within
> > this generic schema that should not be set via the Redfish BIOS interface but
> > instead set via the Systems/system BootSource API we've been using all along.
> >
> > We've found some other BIOS attributes like this as well, where PLDM has defined
> > something as a BIOS value but there is a non-BIOS interface in Redfish to
> > manipulate it. I believe this email thread from Ratan/Manoj is similar [2]
> >
> > We were brainstorming a bit and the best solution seems to be to break up
> > the PLDM BIOS values. Either put the one's backed by non-BIOS Redfish API's into
> > a separate file or name them in a way they can be easily filtered. PLDM then
> > only reports the real BIOS values to bios-settings-mgr and therefore Redfish
> > will only shows this as settable via the generic BIOS Redfish interface.
> > From a host perspective, they all look like BIOS values but how they are set
> > via Redfish would differ based on the the type of BIOS value noted above.
> >
> > PLDM would need to support both the generic bios-settings-mgr BIOS values as
> > well as these other D-Bus backed ones.
> >
> > Thoughts? Sampa is going to get a discord chat going but there's a lot of
> > background here so figured I'd send that out via email.
>
> As you've described, this is really a problem because there are
> multiple APIs within Redish to set these attributes, and to the host
> firmware these are all BIOS attributes. What's the issue if these
> attributes are also included in the Redfish generic BIOS model? The
> pldm daemon should be able to associate BIOS attributes to the
> bios-settings-mgr D-Bus model and/or other D-Bus models. However, I'm
> not sure if we really want to tackle the complexity of excluding
> certain attributes from the bios-settings-mgr D-Bus model.
>
> Thanks,
> Deepak