[Skiboot] OpenPower gard tool rework

[Stewart Smith]

Oliver <oohall at gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, Nov 9, 2017 at 10:28 AM, Cyril Bur <cyrilbur at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, 2017-11-08 at 19:59 +1100, Oliver O'Halloran wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> This series contains a substantial rework of the OpenPower gard tool.
>>> The main additions being:
>>>
>>
>> Hi Oliver,
>>
>> Thanks for the series, looks like a sweet cleanup. The tool has been
>> needing some cleanup for some time.
>>
>> As far as I can tell you haven't changed the fundamental way it
>> reads/writes (in fact you've forced the use of MTD which is a good
>> thing). The reason I ask this is that I'm getting increasingly keen on
>> an OPAL call to get gard records/partitions (details to be worked out),
>> think the way we currently do NVRAM. I can't see any reason why your
>> improvements make a transition to an OPAL call to get data harder but I
>> thought I'd ask.
>
> What does having a separate OPAL call to retrieve gard records buy us compared
> to reading the flash directly?

FFS. I don't want that to be an ABI we expose to userspace forever -
because it's a terrible format that makes using FAT16 look like an
excellent idea.
>> As long as you're happy to deal with the fallout when people discover
>> this (record creation) is a thing and start doing dumb things with it
>> then thumbs up!
>
> *shrug*
>
> EVOIDWARRANTY

:)

Really useful for testing booting degraded though. Especially if we
package gard in petitboot and link op-test in.

-- 
Stewart Smith
OPAL Architect, IBM.