Progress Codes in BMC

[Deepak Kodihalli]

Hi Manoj,

On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 5:25 PM manoj kiran <manojkiran.eda at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> IBM Servers has a feature called Progress codes[1]. These are generated by applications on the BMC & host to show their progress via the standard interfaces like GUI & control panel [2]. These progress codes are used during boot hangs e.t.c to provide additional detail as to how far we made it with respect to boot.
>
> Does the community has shared interests on this & would like to collaborate ?

I am interested in this problem as well and would like to collaborate.
OpenBMC already seems to have solutions for POST codes -
phosphor-host-postd, phosphor-post-code-manager and there's a
Boot.Raw.Value D-Bus API. However it would be nice to have a more
generic solution. I think it's hard to converge on the format of such
codes (since they can originate from different layers of firmware
stacks/bootloaders and some of these layers might not accommodate
PLDM/IPMI etc). What I mean by generic above is:
- A generic D-Bus API for progress codes
- A generic app for managing the policies around such codes
- Platform specific "Producers" of progress codes, conforming to the
generic D-Bus API
- Redfish mechanisms (LogService/other) to extract codes

Maybe some of the apps I pointed above can be extended for this
purpose, but I'm yet to take a closer look.

Thanks,
Deepak