[OpenPower-Firmware] Request for blackbird-xml project under open-power/

[Stewart Smith]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2020, at 12:11 PM, Klaus Heinrich Kiwi wrote:
> Stewart,
> 
> On 12/24/2019 12:04 AM, Stewart Smith wrote:
> > https://github.com/open-power/op-build/commit/592eff791509d66525aea78ae8d35e99c8626a56 merged in support for the Blackbird platform, but there's no https://github.com/open-power/blackbird-xml project so unless you provide overrides when building, the normal "op-build blackbird_defconfig; op-build" process will fail.
> > 
> > I'm happy to maintain a mirror under open-power/ of Raptor's XML tree, as well as any branch/forking that's needed for upstream development.
> > 
> 
> apologies for taking so long to answer this.
> 
> We had a few discussions internally about whether we should be hosting 
> non-IBM or non-OpenPower reference machine definitions within 
> github.com/open-power.

It is disappointing that this is an internal-to-IBM discussion rather than an OpenPower Foundation discussion. I would argue strongly that such the discussion belongs in the System Software Workgroup of the OpenPOWER Foundation.

> And to be quite frankly, that is not yet completely pacified - so I 
> welcome any arguments in favor or against it.

https://github.com/open-power/p9dsu-xml
https://github.com/open-power/mihawk-xml
https://github.com/open-power/p8dtu-xml
https://github.com/open-power/nicole-xml
https://github.com/open-power/stonewither-xml
https://github.com/open-power/vesnin-xml

all aren't IBM/OpenPOWER reference designs and have repositories, with associated maintainers in the ACLs on GitHub. It's been this way for a number of years already :)

The system owners there have (at least write, I don't *think* admin) permission to those repositories (or at least did when I ran the show).

The "does this look sane to include" was PRs to op-build (just like any other project that op-build consumes).

> For the time being, what I can offer is to create the blackbird-xml 
> repository and maintain it. I'd need your initial contribution as a 
> signed-off PR, and I'd be happy to review and commit future PRs as well.

This is a change to existing practice (see above repositories). My experience with most OpenPOWER projects  (quite frankly) leaves me with little trust that anything would be promptly acted on.

That being said, sure. It'd at least enable somebody to clone the op-build repo and build blackbird firmware without it failing, and it could at least be added as a build test in CI.

Feel free to clone github.com/stewartsmith/blackbird-xml into open-power to do this. If there's concerns about the providence of the code, I'm sure Tim can help out with that. I'd prefer we not have to rewrite git history in the repo though, as that would make keeping in sync with what Raptor has as part of their releases much more time involved.

> We don't have Blackbirds as part of our CI, so we can't guarantee NOT to 
> break you with changes. Hopefully that is something we could improve at 
> some point.

Understandable. I only have one, and that's not enough to add to CI (plus, I want to use it). It'd be good to be included in the rc/release process though so I can at least attempt to fix up any issue before an upstream release.

The Blackbird system is, after all, the most affordable and accessible way to get into OpenPOWER firmware hacking, or low level development on POWER.