Where's the docs?

[Michal Suchánek]

On Tue, 20 Dec 2016 13:45:52 +1100
Samuel Mendoza-Jonas <sam at mendozajonas.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 2016-12-19 at 14:26 +0100, Michal Suchánek wrote:
> > As is the case with such BIOS help screens they are 95% redundant
> > to the information already presented on the screen for which they
> > give help.  
> 
> What information do you find is lacking from either the documentation
> or the help screens? I can then look into making it more helpful and
> propagating it out to the main documentation.

I don't think the CUI needs a help screen at all if all the help screen
does is listing the options that you can already see.

If there was an actual manual you could probably give some hint how to
access it or display excerpts that are relevant for the current menu.

> 
> >   
> > >   
> > > > 
> > > > So what it actually does it that it scans any devices it finds
> > > > for any bootloader configuration it understands. Then it picks
> > > > by some undefined algorithm a default system to boot and
> > > > timeout.    
> > > 
> > > Petitboot picks what to boot based on a) the device priority you
> > > have selected and b) the default option specified by the
> > > bootloader configuration. Do you know which version of Petitboot
> > > (or the IBM firmware) you are running? You should see that the
> > > device boot order is configurable in the "System Configuration"
> > > screen.  
> > 
> > Options set on the CUI screens don't persist across reboots so the
> > order is effectively whatever petitboot picks by default. Since the
> > default order is not documented it's effectively random from user's
> > point of view.
> > 
> > Petitboot (dev.20150921)  
> 
> Something definitely isn't right with your system then, configuration
> changes should persist without any issue. I see you're running a
> relatively older version, as a first step try updating to the latest
> firmware release. If you're on an FSP-based machine that's FW860, or
> OP810/OP820 if you're on an OpenPOWER machine.

That's one thing I tried so far. Getting the administrative details
sorted to get access to the firmware updates is .. in progress.

> 
> If that doesn't make a difference open an issue on
> https://github.com/open-power/petitboot, post
> 	/var/log/petitboot/pb-discover.log
> 	/var/log/messages
> 	/sys/firmware/opal/msglog
> and we'll track down what's going on there.

That's something that *could* be in the manual.

Or where the settings are stored and how to access them outside of
petitboot. Surely there are not so many backends that listing them is
out of question.

Thanks

Michal