RDE Enablement

[Deepak Kodihalli]

Hi All,

On Fri, Jun 11, 2021 at 2:02 AM Ed Tanous <edtanous at google.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 1:26 PM Garrett, Mike (HPE Server Firmware)
> <mike.garrett at hpe.com> wrote:
> >
> > Greetings,
> >
> > I'm am interested to know if there has been any organized discussion or development on Redfish Device Enablement (RDE - DMTF DSP0218) for moving encoded Redfish data across PLDM/MCTP interfaces.  We are interested in promoting this standard and are willing to lead a reference implementation for OpenBMC if there is not yet something in progress.  If there is something in progress, can you point me at the work because I would love to see it.
>
> We are interested in this as well, although we are in the early stages
> of looking into it.  Ideally we'd like to have OpenBMC support add in
> cards (NICs, Accelerators, ect) that supported this functionality, and
> make that data available to the normal OpenBMC channels
> (Redfish/ipmi/ect).

I had a couple of questions on RDE, and I wonder if this has crossed
your mind as you started looking at RDE, or if this is
misunderstanding on my part:

1) I understand the problem RDE tries to solve in terms of avoiding
having device-specific knowledge/code on the BMC, but doesn't PLDM
also solve a similar problem? For example, if a device supported PLDM
Type 2 (and other PLDM specs such as the one for FRU, etc), the BMC
could convert PLDM to Redfish. I understand this may not be as
convenient as RDE but it still solves the device-specific code
problem, PLDM being a standard protocol as well. Am I missing
something here? Is it just that RDE is more convenient than PLDM to
Redfish conversion, or is there more to it - for example, PLDM
can't/isn't intended to be converted to Redfish, in an
effective/lossless way?

2) Is RDE specific to a class of devices? Some of the documents I see
stress on I/O adapters. Would be it odd to implement RDE on devices
like Accelerators, CPU, etc?

Thanks,
Deepak