Proposed bmcweb dump LogService "Name" change

[Ed Tanous]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2022 at 6:19 PM Claire Weinan <cweinan at google.com> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> I have opened a bmcweb code review (https://gerrit.openbmc.org/c/openbmc/bmcweb/+/57949) proposing a change to the "Name" property of dump LogServices. This is best shown with examples:
>
> Example from /redfish/v1/Managers/bmc/LogServices/FaultLog:
> Before: "Name": "Dump LogService"
> After: "Name": "FaultLog Dump LogService"
>
> Example from /redfish/v1/Managers/bmc/LogServices/Dump:
> Before: "Name": "Dump LogService"
> After: "Name": "BMC Dump LogService"
>
> Example from /redfish/v1/Systems/system/LogServices/Dump:
> Before: "Name": "Dump LogService"
> After: "Name": "System Dump LogService"
>
> Are any Redfish clients currently matching on this "Name" value? If so, would it be feasible to change from checking if "Name" equals "Dump LogService" to checking if "Name" contains "Dump LogService"?
>
> ---
> Details on the reasoning for changing to a more specific name:
>
> This allows a client to differentiate the dump types of various dump LogServices based on the "Name" property. (For example, the client might only be interested in examining LogServices of one particular dump type.)
>
> From Redfish spec v1.16.0, section 9.6.7 "Name": "The Name property conveys a human-readable moniker for a resource. The data type of the Name property shall be string. The value of Name is NOT required to be unique across resource instances within a resource collection."
>
> Based on the above, the primary purpose of "Name" is to be a "human-readable moniker”. I did not find a statement in the Redfish spec on whether it can be used for type matching.
> One type-related property in the LogService schema is "LogEntryType" -- however the possible values (Event, Multiple, OEM, SEL) aren't fine-grained enough to determine the exact dump type for this use case.

Please open a discussion in a DMTF forum to discuss this.  Not finding
a statement would imply that there's something that needs to be
changed in the redfish specification itself.

>
> So in the absence of another suitable LogService property for a client to use to differentiate between dump types (and various OEM LogService types in general), we opt to use the "Name" property.

Lets get clarification from the standards body on how this feature is
intended to work (I believe there's already some discussion going on)
and go from there.  Depending on what the decision is, we can decide
what the next steps are, but as proposed, this would make the "Name"
field part of the unchangeable API.  When we've hit this issue before
in the case of sensors, we ended up making it a system-specific
decision.  I'm not sure that's the right approach here.

As an added comment, there are more than just OpenBMC systems out
there running Redfish, so if we actually want to use the Name field
for this purpose, it would need prefixed with "OpenBMC" to
differentiate it from other types of logs with similar naming.

>
> Best Regards,
> Claire Weinan
> --
>
> Claire Weinan
> Software Engineer
> cweinan at google.com