[OpenBIOS] System Health Monitoring and current build compatibility

[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:
> 
>  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!

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.