I am not qualified to comment on “how”, but I see value in a BMC that can license features. However, it should cover both hardware and firmware. I can imagine licensed algorithms implemented as firmware. 

Given that a licensed feature might impact availability of information via gui or service, it must support queries for availability so services can behave properly when enabled and disabled.

Mike



Hi Team,

Any comments on the below proposal?

Ratan

On Fri, Apr 30, 2021 at 11:45 PM Ratan Gupta <ratankgupta31@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi All,

I would like to introduce a dbus model proposal around pay for access features.Normally IBM system ships with more hardware than was purchased, which can be unlocked later.

Features could be 1) AIX enabled/disabled  
2) How many processors are enabled
3) How much memory is enabled

Proposed Model:

The model consists of following main entities:1 - licenses - these objects represents the features.  There will be a license represnting 
feature(one is to one relation ship) and these objects have state - active, inactive, unknown, etc.
These objects could implement the Delete interface for when a client wishes to disable the license/feature.

2 - manager - the manager object (distinct from freedesktop object manager) provides a method
interface to create new license objects.

Alternate Dbus Model:

1 - Licenses: these objects represent an agreement.  These objects have an
association to one or more features, and these objects have state - active,inactive, unknown, etc.
These objects could implement the Delete interface for when a client wishes to disable the license.

2 - Features: these objects describe the features available.
Feature objects would be static and implementation/platform defined.  A BMC or host firmware update 
could potentially add or remove the available features exposed as dbus objects.  At the moment the 
only feature attribute I can think of is a name and the feature status.

3 Manager - the manager object (distinct from freedesktop object manager)
provides a method interface to create new license objects.

The difference between two models areIn the alternate Dbus model we are keeping the feature Dbus object and the License have an associated features
In the proposed model we are only keeping the license D-bus object which represent the feature.

Flow would be as below with the proposed model -1/ Manager object would be having interface like upload (License activation key)
2/ On IBM systems we send this key to the host firmware which activates the features
3/ Host Firmware sends the activated feature list to the BMC
4/ BMC creates the licenses for the activated features

I suspect an implementation of the above flow is highly IBM specific, 
but I hope some of you have some feedback that might enable some collaboration.  
If not - where should we put this application?

Ratan