IPMI Sensor Name limitation of 16 bytes

[Ed Tanous]

On Mon, May 8, 2023 at 10:52 AM Rohit Pai <ropai at nvidia.com> wrote:
>
> Would like to receive feedback about this solution and any alternative that may exist to solve this problem. Any pointers on existing patch also would be helpful.
>

Overall, I'm in support of this feature, and I think it would give us
a lot more flexibility in Redfish in the future.  It's one of the
design points that I really wasn't happy with in the original sensor
subsystem.

While I think most would directly take this feature, one thing to keep
in mind is that there were organizations that had the requirement to
be able to map IPMI names to Redfish names using a reasonable
algorithm.  Having this supported would break that requirement, but I
think that's something that an individual machine can figure out by
coming up with names less than 16 characters for platforms that have
this requirement.

One thing I would also very much caution against is reducing the
performance of SDR listing any more than it already is.  It's current
performance is at basically the bare minimum of where it should be, so
if making this change requires any additional dbus calls, that's going
to cause some problems.


One thing I had advocated for in the past is simply doing algorithmic
string reduction until it fits, using the most common transforms.

Power -> Pwr
Temperature -> Temp
Power Supply -> PSU

These are algorithms that humans already do today manually to get to
the 16 char length, so in theory you could do this transform without
any changes needed to the actual platform configs, and if someone
wanted to reverse the algorithm later and come up with the Redfish
string, they could.  Something you could consider, but there might be
simpler ideas that meet your goals.