petitboot percieved performance difference at V1.2.7 for OPAL 860.20

Stewart Smith sesmith at au1.ibm.com
Thu Feb 9 15:28:03 AEDT 2017


Michael Landry <mlandry at us.ibm.com> writes:
> For petitboot changes for Briggs and Stratton, a great deal was made of the
> messages and pb-discover work done during the petitboot to assure the user
> there was no performance slowdown.
>
> The PetitBoot release notes do not call attention to this other than the
> "server connect message" was made more clear.
>
>    v1.3.2 and v1.2.7 both contain the following new fixes:
>
>    - discover/platform-powerpc: Reject bootdevs with empty UUIDs
>    	This fixes an NVRAM parsing issue that could lead to a segfault in
>    the
>    	ncurses UI. v1.2.7 also fixes this for old-style bootdev parameters.
>
>    - ui/ncurses: Spin child to ensure autoboot cancelled on exit
>    	Avoids the scenario where a user could exit the UI and have the
>    	pb-discover server still autoboot from underneath them.
>
>    - ui/ncurses: Make server connect message more clear.
>
>
> But this was added to the OpenPower Briggs and Stratton readme :
>
>    The V2.00 firmware for LC Server is now less verbose during boot - only
>    error-level messages are printed during Petitboot bootloader
>    initialization.  This means that there will be fewer messages printed as
>    the system boots.
>
>    Additionally, the Petitboot user interface is started earlier in the
>    boot process. This means that you will be presented with the user
>    interface sooner, but it may still take time, potentially up to 30
>    seconds, for the user interface to be populated with boot options as
>    storage and network hardware is being initialized.  During this time,
>    Petitboot will show the status message "Info: Waiting for device
>    discovery".  When Petitboot device discovery is completed, the following
>    status message will be shown "Info: Connected to pb-discover!".
>
> Will the OPAL  860.10 users moving up to 860.20 (V1.2.6 to V1.2.7 for
> petitboot need the same guidance that was given to the Briggs and Stratton
> users to let thme performance is actually similar.
>
> Or is this new behavior only seen on BMC systems with the FSP doing the PB
> discovery as part of its VPD collection process?  Therefore,  there is no
> impact for the Power 860 systems?

It's separate discover to what the FSP dose for VPD collection.

Ahh, well spotted.

Yeah, we should note on all systems that too.

On an FSP system with IPR cards it could be about equal in perception as
on B&S. The IPR cards *can* take a long time to find all the disks (it
very much depends on how many cards, how many disks etc etc).



-- 
Stewart Smith
OPAL Architect, IBM.



More information about the Petitboot mailing list