RDE Enablement

[Garrett, Mike (HPE Server Firmware)]

Great!  We are interested in RDE becoming ubiquitous on adapter cards so that Redfish configuration of storage and networking doesn't have to include adapter specific code.  A good success metric would be the ability to create a storage logical volume using nothing but standard Redfish operations.  In pursuit of this, a solid open source OpenBMC implementation seems like a good way to put RDE on the right footing.

My initial thoughts would be to build an RDE systemd service on top of the existing pldmd service and have an upper interface into the standard dbus interfaces for inventory, status, and configuration.  However, I suspect there's some additional dbus work needed to join RDE to bmcweb because there will be a need to dynamically change the Redfish model and support things like Actions.  A requirement for this to work would be the ability to discover PLDM devices and assign IDs (MCTP EID) in order to interrogate them for RDE capabilities.  It is unclear to me that the current PLDM and MCTP code handles discovery or if it assumes devices.

Happy to hear from folks about the best way to get this started.

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: openbmc <openbmc-bounces+mike.garrett=hpe.com at lists.ozlabs.org> On Behalf Of Ed Tanous
Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2021 3:32 PM
To: Garrett, Mike (HPE Server Firmware) <mike.garrett at hpe.com>
Cc: OpenBMC Maillist <openbmc at lists.ozlabs.org>
Subject: Re: RDE Enablement

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).

>
> What is the normal sequence for proposing, debating and finalizing major new features?

The mailing list tends to be a good choice for the very early discussions.  https://github.com/openbmc/docs/blob/master/designs/design-template.md
tends to be a more formal process if that's what you're looking for.

>  Would I submit something in Gerrit for review (e.g. a markdown file for the docs/designs repo?)   We could probably get something started fairly soon.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Mike