Adding support for custom SEL records

[Bills, Jason M]

On 10/19/2022 11:10 AM, Brad Bishop wrote:
> Thanks Jason
> 
> On Wed, Oct 19, 2022 at 09:50:47AM -0600, Bills, Jason M wrote:
> 
>> Intel had a requirement to support storing at least 4000 log entries. 
> 
> Ok.  So is it fair to assume anyone using the DBus backend does not have 
> this requirement?

That is my assumption, yes.
> 
>> At the time, we were able to get about 400 entries on D-Bus before 
>> D-Bus performance became unusable.
> 
> To anyone using the DBus backend - have you observed similar performance 
> issues?
> 
> Jason is there a testcase or scenario I can execute to highlighht the 
> issues you refer to concretely?  Maybe something like "create 4000 sels, 
> run ipmitool and see how long it takes?"

To clarify, my understanding is the D-Bus performance issues were not 
isolated to just IPMI.  All of D-Bus for every BMC service was impacted.

If I remember correctly, Ed Tanous is who did the initial evaluation, so 
he may have more detail.  But I think it was similar to what you 
suggest: Create 4000 logs on D-Bus and check the performance.  This 
could be done with ipmitool.
> 
>> I'd also be curious about the reverse question.  Is there any benefit 
>> to storing logs on D-Bus that makes it a better solution?
> 
> Yes, this is exactly the question I've been trying to ask.  The answer 
> seems only to be that the code is in meta-intel/intel-ipmi-oem - but 
> that is easily fixed by moving the code to 
> meta-phosphor/phosphor-host-ipmid.
> 
>> At the risk of complicating things more (https://xkcd.com/927/), D-Bus 
>> was the primary solution when Intel joined.  We created the rsyslog 
>> approach because of the limitation imposed by D-Bus.  But I know there 
>> are still those who don't like the rsyslog approach.  Is there a way 
>> we can now get together and define a new logging solution that is 
>> fully upstream and avoids the drawbacks of both existing solutions?
> 
> I hope so, because doing that would make things a lot easier for our 
> users adopting OpenBMC.

My main requirements are to store many logs (at least 4000 was the 
original number, but I can try to get an updated number if needed) and 
have them persist across BMC reboots.

We currently accomplish this using rsyslog to extract logs from the 
journal and store them in a persistent text file.

How is best to approach starting a new design discussion?  Should we 
continue discussing in this thread?  Start a design doc review? 
Something else?
> 
> Thanks,
> brad