Making obmc-console_git.bb more generic (again)?

[Andrew Jeffery]

On Tue, 23 Nov 2021, at 03:25, Patrick Williams wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 05:01:25PM -0500, Oskar Senft wrote:
>> Hi everyone
>> 
>> I noticed that as of
>> https://gerrit.openbmc-project.xyz/c/openbmc/openbmc/+/30369 (aka
>> https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc/commit/abf95efe7c3a34cc2e5d7424abb59710fb4a1d4d),
>> obmc-console_git.bb assumes that we always want to use ttyVUART0.
>
> There was a push to move service files outside of the openbmc/openbmc repository
> and into the underlying repos.  Brad could comment on why as he was
> asking for it.
>
>> We used to have support for OBMC_CONSOLE_HOST_TTY and then create the
>> symlink /etc/obmc-console/server.${OBMC_CONSOLE_HOST_TTY}.conf as
>> needed.
>> 
>> From what I can tell, OBMC_CONSOLE_HOST_TTY is still used in quite a
>> few machine layers. Some of them (e.g. meta-amd and meta-facebook)
>> even went so far to replicate the previous behavior by deleting
>> /etc/obmc-console/server.VUART0.conf and then re-creating the correct
>> one.
>
> Speaking for the Facebook machines, we have some machines which use a different
> vTTY and we have other machines which manage multiple hosts and thus have
> multiple vTTYs.  We probably should have contributed code to pass the desired
> vTTY(s) as a meson-option.
>
>> Is this actually the expected behavior? Or was that just an oversight
>> in the commit?
>
> I think it was the "put the default/typical config into the repo and let
> everyone customize it otherwise if they need" approach.
>
>> I'd be happy to send a review request to make this generic again if
>> people agree. A bunch of follow-up commits could then remove the
>> duplicate code in individual machine layer overrides.
>
> I'd be thankful for this.  Please feel free to add me as a reviewer.

Yeah I'm not sure what happened here, whether that was something I did 
or if someone's made changes to the recipe since. When I added support 
for exposing multiple devices from the one BMC there were some 
complications around not breaking everyone vs having to modify every 
in-tree consumer. I didn't have the bandwidth or ability to test fixing 
all the platforms at the time so I put some work-arounds in the install 
phase of the obmc-console recipe. Maybe that broke things?

Anyway, please also CC me on cleanups.

Cheers,

Andrew