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On 01/08/2017 09:27 AM, Taiidan@gmx.com wrote:
On 01/08/2017 08:12 AM, Paul Kocialkowski wrote:
Le samedi 07 janvier 2017 à 22:14 -0500, Taiidan@gmx.com a écrit :
Ah thanks for the info, I had thought all IBM POWER8 systems had open firmware :( So to confirm, the more reasonably priced S812LC for 4.8K doesn't have it? What a shame.
The S812LC (codename Habanero) has OpenPOWER support but doesn't have OpenBMC support yet, so you can boot the CPU(s) with free software but the BMC can only use the non-free system it has preinstalled sofar.
It's not impossible that Habanero support gets added to OpenBMC in the future, but it's hard to say when and if it's going to happen.
Cheers,
I see. I had assumed the difference between both was simply corporate style marketing or a different CPU/ram and that IBM had simply opened its own firmware rather than making new firmware (why not....weird)
IBM licensed its original BMC firmware from a third party and was unable to release it as a result. IBM concurrently brought up a libre BMC firmware, but this libre firmware is still not functional when combined with the libre system firmware on any other machine than Palmetto. We have been working off and on to restore functionality, and have put in a sizeable amount of effort on the S822LC BMC to the point where you can use a libre BMC firmware with the proprietary IBM firmware or vice versa, but not both together; fixing this is a medium-low priority task here but we have not had a chance to work on it for the past several months.
Is it possible to use it without the BMC by installing a graphics card or using a serial port? Can it initialize graphics attached to a VM or bare metal?
No! The BMC is critical to system initialization on OpenPOWER systems; there is no way whatsoever to bypass it, and it sits at a sufficiently high privilege level to make use with the proprietary firmware just about as insecure as using a stock UEFI network-enabled firmware on x86.
Paul, how do you feel about IBM's customer service? for that much money they had better deliver a native english speaking staff who knows what they're doing.
We've primarily had contact with the design teams, so I cannot directly comment on this. I will say that IBM takes issues with the systems quite seriously at least on the business side of things.
- -- Timothy Pearson Raptor Engineering +1 (415) 727-8645 (direct line) +1 (512) 690-0200 (switchboard) https://www.raptorengineering.com