preventing chassis power-on until bmc Ready

[Michael Richardson]

Andrew Geissler <geissonator at gmail.com> wrote:
    > 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.

That would really be awesome... server boot times have become ridiculous,
with the time amount of Black Screen (BMC boot time I think) time seeming to
be increasing...
I think that Dell had to tweak some things a decade ago when people started
putting multiple hundred Gb of ram in; I have old servers that take 10+
minutes to POST.

I do wonder if, as you say, the whack-a-mole should continue, or if the host
should just be able to inquire (and wait) for the BMC to finish booting.
So, don't prevent the host from booting, but allow the host to synchronize
with the BMC before it continues.
That would be in the BIOS, and perhaps could even be a prototyped as a (host) grub module.

It seems like there is a lot of mechanism in the BMC that affects the host
booting. (Like virtual USB bootable media)
It would also be very very annoying if one never could get boot console
capture after a cold boot, but only after a warm boot.

--
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        | network architect  [
]     mcr at sandelman.ca  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [


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