preventing chassis power-on until bmc Ready

[William Kennington]

I don't really like using multi-user.target to order host startup
because we may have lots of optional or non-critical services that
take a long time to become ready that just end up delaying the boot
time of the server (which is a critical amount of time to reduce for
our usecase). I can also see how different platforms probably have
different definitions of "critical" components based on what the
bootup firmware ends up querying the BMC for. But having some kind of
unit we can opt-in to ordering services against may be useful as we
have our own targets for this purpose on google BMCs.

On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 2:03 PM Andrew Geissler <geissonator at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> We at IBM have been finding cases where we wrote our services in a way that they
> assume the BMC has reached "Ready" state prior to a chassis power on and host
> firmware boot being allowed to start. For example, to power on the chassis, you
> need to have collected all of the vpd associated with the VRM's and power
> supplies. This vpd collection occurs on the way to BMC Ready, and services
> in the power on target assume it's all been collected. We have other scenarios
> like this and we're wondering if we continue to whack-a-mole by fixing
> these individually with explicit service dependencies or do something a bit
> more global to ensure our systems aren't allowed to power on until the BMC
> has reached the "Ready" state. This state ensures all inventory and other
> system data has been collected and created on d-bus.
>
> The BMC reaches the "Ready" state once all services within the multi-user.target
> have successfully started running.
>
> I know in the past I've heard of servers that allow both the BMC and Host
> to boot in parallel (which sounds awesome) but we're not there yet. I'm
> contemplating an optional package in phosphor-state-manager that could be
> installed and put in the obmc-chassis-poweron at .target and prevent
> any other services running until the BMC reached Ready.
>
> The obmc-chassis-poweron at .target does have a "After=multi-user.target" within
> it but that doesn't control the services within the poweron target. It just
> ensures systemd will not consider the obmc-chassis-poweron at .target complete
> until multi-user.target has completed.
>
> Anyone else have a similar issue and/or thoughts on this problem?
>
> Thanks,
> Andrew