Progress Codes in BMC

[Brad Bishop]

On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 08:52:14AM -0600, Patrick Williams wrote:

>I was also going to point to the postcode daemons as a good starting
>point.  On Intel platforms, the postcodes are typically 1 byte.  The
>previous postcode daemon got its data from the LPC "port 80" mechanism,
>but Facebook/HCL recently extended it to support multi-host and to be
>able to consume postcodes from an IPMB end-point (which is how we talk
>to our per-host microcontroller).
>
>I think it should be fairly straight-forward to add a new mechanism to
>pick up data from PLDM or whatever your path is on Power.  

There are multiple sources of the codes - on Power the power sequencing 
is done on the BMC and that is considered part of the server boot so we 
have both those applications indicating their progress along with the 
more traditional progress flowing down from system firmware.

>The daemons
>in question here already support keeping a history as well.  I think the
>only think you'd need to do is extend it to be 32-bit or 64-bit progress
>codes instead of just 8-bit, but I see no reason why that shouldn't be
>acceptable.

Our progress codes are much larger than 64 bits.  More like 64 bytes.  
Does that still seem acceptable?

There were lots of great implementation ideas in this thread, thanks to 
everyone that replied.

I'd also like to sort out the external facing interfaces for these codes 
though.  My straw-man proposal would be that these are just another log 
service with yet another additionaldatauri attachment in the log 
entries.  Is this a terrible idea?

- brad