RFC: ASRockRack E3C246D4I port

[Zev Weiss]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 08:50:07PM CDT, Joel Stanley wrote:
>On Tue, 23 Mar 2021 at 22:25, Zev Weiss <zweiss at equinix.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> We (Equinix Metal, formerly known as Packet) having been working on a
>> port of OpenBMC to the ASRockRack E3C246D4I board
>> (https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=E3C246D4I-2T,
>> an AST2500-equipped Xeon E-2100 mini-ITX board), and we're now looking to
>> get some feedback from the community and hopefully start the process of
>> getting it merged upstream.
>
>Nice!
>
>>
>> It's currently sitting in a Github branch, since at the moment I'm
>> mostly seeking fairly broad guidance on what sorts of things will need
>> to happen to get it into a mergeable form (not sure if gerrit is the
>> right tool for that).  Anyone who'd like to can take a look at:
>> https://github.com/zevweiss/openbmc/tree/e3c246d4i
>>
>> Known issues, in approximate descending order of significance (by my
>> estimate):
>>
>>   - The kernel situation is...kind of messy.  This mostly stems from
>>     having a dependency on the PECI code, which is why the branch is
>>     based on the 2.9.0 tag (the last one before the PECI patchset was
>>     dropped from the openbmc kernel) instead of something more recent.
>>     We've got some additional PECI patches on top of that to work around
>>     some limitations in the PECI support on the particular CPU we're
>>     working with, some of which is fairly gross hardcoding for that
>>     specific SKU.  There are also a few non-PECI-related kernel patches
>>     that I've posted upstream but not yet incorporated the resulting
>>     review feedback on.
>
>As you point out, it would be great if someone could take on the PECI
>maintainership and get the code merged to mainline.
>
>Out of interest, can you still boot the host without PECI support?
>

Yes, we're using PECI for monitoring CPU thermals but that's about it;
we can boot the host without it.

>I recommend submitting your device tree now, and getting some level of
>support in the openbmc tree. From there you can work to get the other
>fixes into the tree.
>

Alright, I'll start out with getting some baseline bits and pieces in
place and see about the trickier parts when I get to them.


Thanks,
Zev