Redfish implementation does not supply SoftwareId

[Richard Hughes]

Hi all,

My name is Richard Hughes and I'm the upstream maintainer of fwupd
which is a linux program that allows flashing hardware. It's used by a
few million people already and there's recently been a lot of interest
about getting fwupd to run on the actual BMC chip, rather than on the
host OS. That's not really what this email is about, but might explain
the bigger picture. I'll come back to this in a few weeks time :)

At the moment fwupd runs on the host OS and uses a plugin to
communicate with various Redfish implementations, for example iDRAC
for Dell or XClarity for Lenovo. Teddy Reed kindly donated (loaned?)
me some hardware so I could test the fwupd plugin against the Redfish
implementation of OpenBMC, more specifically git master on a
evb-ast2500 board.

With a small patch to fwupd (setting CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST=0) it
seems to load and enumerate correctly, but doesn't add any devices.
The reason I found was that the SoftwareId property is missing from
the /redfish/v1/UpdateService/FirmwareInventory/7d021ade path. The
SoftwareId is the "key" that maps the hardware to a specific firmware
*stream*, so for instance it could be something like
"USB\VID_17EF&PID_3083" for a peripheral or some other kind of
vendor-specific string, e.g. "SAMSUNG MZVLB2T0HALB-000L7". The idea is
that vendors then upload firmware to the LVFS website with a defined
*stream* and updates get deployed onto matching hardware
automatically. I'm not so sure that makes a huge amount of sense for
the OpenBMC BMC image itself. Or maybe it does; getting new official
OpenBMC images from the LVFS would be way cool, but I don't think we
want to flash the entire MTD image. Anyway, I digress.

I guess my question is if I could get a SoftwareId set for 7d021ade --
e.g. "evb-ast2500" -- that at least allows the device to enumerate in
fwupd and gives me something to test against. I guess my next question
is how a OpenBMC distributor adds a new device into
/redfish/v1/UpdateService/FirmwareInventory.Members -- and if there's
a way to set SoftwareId for that new device too.

Sorry if all these are newbie questions, and I appreciate any
pointers; I'm happy to send patches. Thanks.

Richard.