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

[Stewart Smith]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2020, at 12:49 PM, Dan Horák wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Mar 2020 16:11:33 -0300
> Klaus Heinrich Kiwi <klaus at linux.vnet.ibm.com> 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.
> > 
> > And to be quite frankly, that is not yet completely pacified - so I 
> > welcome any arguments in favor or against it.
> 
> my arguments are in favor
> - there are already repos carrying machine xml for the Yadro platforms
> (vesnin, nicole)
> - I see a value in having a single upstream for all OpenPOWER based
> hw under the open-power git hub org, it will present a unified
> ecosystem as opposed to situation where everyone maintains their own
> fork only

That has been the historical position. It also lets us easily know what is (and is not) being used. Otherwise you can never delete dead code as you have no idea if it's dead or not. Nor can you refactor something to remove complexity, as you can't get a solid view of what may require that complexity.

> Other option how to solve the machine xml repos is to allow referencing
> the vendor git repos in the machine op-build config files, like I did
> in
> https://github.com/sharkcz/op-build/commit/ad44535b36cf1ee11caa249c2185990ef16ede1a
> 
> > 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.
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> There was discussion on the last OpenPOWER Summit in Lyon about having
> a shared lab where vendors could place their HW and it could be used
> for various purposes like CI.

Yeah, this has been discussed for a number of years, but there's never been the funding to back it up (both in $ and in people)