System Health Monitoring and current build compatibility

[Rohret, David M]

Greetings,

I have a project to monitor the voltage from a mainboards power conditioner and trigger a warning when it exceeds normal parameters by more than 7%. Commercial bios dev teams are reluctant to divulge any information, so I would like to install my own instance to do the job.  I have 1 quick and 1 not so quick questions:

1.  ??I'm not confined to a specific motherboard, so I would like to use one that is compatible with the latest build of OpenBios; suggestions?
  2.  If anyone has dealt with system health, any suggestions where to start?

I appreciate any help!

Dave

David M. Rohret, CSRA, Inc.
Senior Principal Systems Engineer // Distinguished Engineer
CSRA Inc. | Defense | Air force | FIERCE Labs
[e-mail]
Unique Mission Cell/JVAB, p: 210-218-1954

This electronic message transmission contains information from CSRA that may be attorney-client privileged, proprietary or confidential. The information in this message is intended only for use by the individual(s) to whom it is addressed. If you believe you have received this message in error, please contact me immediately and be aware that any use, disclosure, copying or distribution of the contents of this message is strictly prohibited. NOTE: Regardless of content, this email shall not operate to bind CSRA to any order or other contract unless pursuant to explicit written agreement or government initiative expressly permitting the use of email for such purpose.

[Programmingkid]

> On Aug 8, 2017, at 8:40 PM, Rohret, David M  wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> I have a project to monitor the voltage from a mainboards power conditioner and trigger a warning when it exceeds normal parameters by more than 7%. Commercial bios dev teams are reluctant to divulge any information, so I would like to install my own instance to do the job.  I have 1 quick and 1 not so quick questions:
>    • ​​I'm not confined to a specific motherboard, so I would like to use one that is compatible with the latest build of OpenBios; suggestions?
>    • If anyone has dealt with system health, any suggestions where to start? 
> I appreciate any help!
>
> Dave
>
> David M. Rohret, CSRA, Inc.
> Senior Principal Systems Engineer // Distinguished Engineer
> CSRA Inc. | Defense | Air force | FIERCE Labs
> [e-mail]
> Unique Mission Cell/JVAB, p: 210-218-1954
> This electronic message transmission contains information from CSRA that may be attorney-client privileged, proprietary or confidential. The information in this message is intended only for use by the individual(s) to whom it is addressed. If you believe you have received this message in error, please contact me immediately and be aware that any use, disclosure, copying or distribution of the contents of this message is strictly prohibited. NOTE: Regardless of content, this email shall not operate to bind CSRA to any order or other contract unless pursuant to explicit written agreement or government initiative expressly permitting the use of email for such purpose.
>
> OpenBIOS                 http://openbios.org/
> Mailinglist:  http://lists.openbios.org/mailman/listinfo
> Free your System - May the Forth be with you

Wouldn't you be able to do this with something like a Raspberry Pi 3 board without OpenBIOS?

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

On 09/08/17 01:40, Rohret, David M wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I have a project to monitor the voltage from a mainboards power
> conditioner and trigger a warning when it exceeds normal parameters by
> more than 7%. Commercial bios dev teams are reluctant to divulge any
> information, so I would like to install my own instance to do the job.
>  I have 1 quick and 1 not so quick questions:
> ​​I'm not confined to a specific motherboard, so I would like to use
> one that is compatible with the latest build of OpenBios; suggestions?
> If anyone has dealt with system health, any suggestions where to start?
>
> I appreciate any help!

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the email, and sorry the delay in my reply as it has been a
busy week here!

There are really 2 aspects to what you are trying to do: the first is
the low-level initialisation of the hardware components and the second
is the BIOS. For the first part of this I suspect you will end up using
coreboot which has support for most chipsets, and then once that is done
you can launch a payload (typically an ELF executable) which is the
user-facing part of the BIOS.

The choice of BIOS really comes down to which platform and what
functionality you are looking for: OpenBIOS is included with QEMU and is
used to boot SPARC/Mac PPC images so those parts get tested and
scrutinised a lot. x86 is a lot less well tested, and to be honest most
people using x86 will not want to use a Forth-based BIOS like OpenBIOS
but instead one of the newer open-source UEFI BIOSs to make the most of
newer hardware.

I hope that helps answer some of your questions, if you have any further
queries then I'll try my best to answer them :)

ATB,

Mark.