Hi...all

[anand bhagwantrao]

Hi all,

Im want to know which IPMI BMC card is supported by Coreboot.
Im building a server where i want both ipmi bmc manageability and coreboot.
If anyone find.....?pls let me know...

Thanks

[ron minnich]

What would coreboot need to do to "support" IPMI BMC?

ron

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

On 05.03.2010 19:26, ron minnich wrote:
> What would coreboot need to do to "support" IPMI BMC?

Depends on the IPMI BMC. If you're lucky, it works out of the box, and
if you're unlucky, you have to implement undocumented BIOS interfaces.
The easiest solution is to buy a card and try it, and if it doesn't
work, reverse engineer it or try another card.

Besides that, IPMI is a security nightmare (see the discussions on the
linux-kernel mailing list about IPMI bypassing host network security).

Regards,
Carl-Daniel

[Ward Vandewege]

On Sat, Mar 06, 2010 at 01:12:51AM +0100, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
> On 05.03.2010 19:26, ron minnich wrote:
> > What would coreboot need to do to "support" IPMI BMC?
>
> Depends on the IPMI BMC. If you're lucky, it works out of the box, and
> if you're unlucky, you have to implement undocumented BIOS interfaces.
> The easiest solution is to buy a card and try it, and if it doesn't
> work, reverse engineer it or try another card.
>
> Besides that, IPMI is a security nightmare (see the discussions on the
> linux-kernel mailing list about IPMI bypassing host network security).

Even worse - I have yet to encounter a reliable IPMI card. The sorts of
problems I've encountered are:

* specific packets can 'kill' the IPMI controller. Once the thing is hung,
  the only fix is a *cold* boot of the entire machine. 
* I've seen machines crash, taking the IPMI controller with them. Makes
  the whole thing kind of pointless...
* general reliability issues. IPMI controllers also seem to like to hang
  themselves occasionally

I really tried to make IPMI work reliably; I have an 80 machine cluster full
of these things. I wasted a ton of time on them (3 different generations from
2 vendors - Tyan and Supermicro).

I think that those issues were largely caused by extremely crappy proprietary
firmware. But there is a more fundamental issue; the IPMI BMC is pretty
tightly connected into the mainboard, by design. That's bad - how can you
guarantee that IPMI BMC will always be available, fully out of band, when it
is not 100% independent of the mainboard?

In the end I gave up; I now use serial console servers (opengear is highly
recommended) and switched PDUs (I've tried various brands, so far I like
Raritan's Dominion series the best). That works, 100% of the time.

Thanks,
Ward.

[ron minnich]

So, if you're looking to buy 150 or so nodes, what's a reasonable
coreboot-capable node *without* any sort of BMC/IPMI? I really need
these IPMI-free boards and the vendors keep trying to shove this IPMI
nonsense down our throats -- in spite of the fact that IPMI is such a
failure. It's easy to see why, they get to charge a pretty nice
premium for the  presence of those BMCs.

Coreboot would be a huge plus. A 45-second POST, in this day and age,
is just simply ridiculous. Even were we to accept that 45-second post,
 the BIOS on this Nehalem new board is so defective that it's just
unusuable for what we need -- it doesn't always come out of a reset.

Ward, what's the latest thing you know of?

thanks

ron

server hardware without IPMI / with coreboot

[Ward Vandewege]

On Sat, Mar 06, 2010 at 08:03:40AM -0800, ron minnich wrote:
> So, if you're looking to buy 150 or so nodes, what's a reasonable
> coreboot-capable node *without* any sort of BMC/IPMI? I really need
> these IPMI-free boards and the vendors keep trying to shove this IPMI
> nonsense down our throats -- in spite of the fact that IPMI is such a
> failure. It's easy to see why, they get to charge a pretty nice
> premium for the  presence of those BMCs.

While the IPMI BMC is tightly integrated with the mainboard, it tends to be
an optional module on Supermicro (and Tyan, I guess, I have not looked
recently though) boards. So you can definitely order without the module.
> Coreboot would be a huge plus. A 45-second POST, in this day and age,
> is just simply ridiculous. Even were we to accept that 45-second post,
>  the BIOS on this Nehalem new board is so defective that it's just
> unusuable for what we need -- it doesn't always come out of a reset.
>
> Ward, what's the latest thing you know of?

I still like Opteron a lot. Here's the current list of Supermicro boards
based on the latest SR56x0/SP5100 chipset:

http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Opteron2000/

I wonder if these boards will take the 8 and 12 core CPUs AMD is due to
release at the end of this month.

Silicon Mechanics has a few systems built on those boards, but so far only a
2U (nServ A346) and 3U (A362). They should be able to to tell you when they
will have 1U systems (assuming that's what you are looking for here).

There are also very nifty 'twin' systems (1U) and 2x2 twin systems (4 boards,
hot swappable, in a 2U chassis with redundant power and 12 disk bays). Sadly,
I've only seen the 2x2 with Intel boards, so far...

My experience is that if you talk to a vendor like Silicon Mechanics or Aspen
Systems and tell them you want to buy 150 systems, they will at least *try*
to help with coreboot by talking to their suppliers.

I guess the most important thing right now would be to get AMD to release
docs (and code?) for the SR56x0/SP5100 chipset. With that, supporting any of
the boards listed above might be possible. This chipset is likely to be
around for a while (5 years?).

Thanks,
Ward.

[yhlu]

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 10:26 AM, ron minnich  wrote:
> What would coreboot need to do to "support" IPMI BMC?

need to use BT or KCS interface to tell FRU list esp for the devices there
is side band access from BMC

also may need to abitritry etc to make sure BMC and host don't access some
devices at same time
like GPIO, and i2c...

YH

[ron minnich]

On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 12:24 PM, yhlu  wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 10:26 AM, ron minnich  wrote:
> > What would coreboot need to do to "support" IPMI BMC?
>
> need to use BT or KCS interface to tell FRU list esp for the devices there
> is side band access from BMC
>
> also may need to abitritry etc to make sure BMC and host don't access some
> devices at same time
> like GPIO, and i2c...

ah. You just gave me another reason to never want a BMC on board :-)

OK, good to know.

ron

[Stefan Reinauer]

On 3/6/10 9:24 PM, yhlu wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 10:26 AM, ron minnich <[e-mail]
> > wrote:
> What would coreboot need to do to "support" IPMI BMC?
>
>
> need to use BT or KCS interface to tell FRU list esp for the devices
> there is side band access from BMC

Is there a standard way of doing this? Or is this mainboard /IPMI card
dependend?

[yhlu]

On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 4:34 AM, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> On 3/6/10 9:24 PM, yhlu wrote:
>
> On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 10:26 AM, ron minnich  wrote:
> > What would coreboot need to do to "support" IPMI BMC?
>
> need to use BT or KCS interface to tell FRU list esp for the devices there
> is side band access from BMC
>
> Is there a standard way of doing this? Or is this mainboard /IPMI card
> dependend?
>
> should be standard.

you can check ipmi driver in linux kernel.

could have one simple version to hard code several impi message.

Thanks

Yinghai