Re: OpenBMC Image Management

[Stewart Smith <stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

Adriana Kobylak <anoo@linux.vnet.ibm.com> writes:
>> On Jun 19, 2017, at 12:44 AM, Stewart Smith <stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Adriana Kobylak <anoo@linux.vnet.ibm.com> writes:
>>>> Why is there mboxbridge separate from phosphor-mboxd?
>>> 
>>> Because the mboxbridge is being used by other companies as a reference
>>> to be able to implement the mailbox daemon in their own BMC firmware
>>> stack for other openpower systems, we didn’t want to “pollute” the
>>> repository with openbmc-specific and c++ implementation that could
>>> confuse them.
>> 
>> Why are there OpenBMC specific things in mboxd?
>> 
>> Why can't the reference implementation be used? What's deficient in it?
>
> For OpenBMC, we’re having the PNOR chip with a filesystem, so mboxd
> would read/write files instead of looking for the data at an offset in
> the chip. Nothing deficient with it, just a different implementation
> that needs to be handled.

Why not have an MBOX protocol that supports partitions/files natively
then? Why not develop this upstream? Surely this is something others
could be interested in.

It seems really backwards having a bunch of things convert to/from FFS
for no reason.

The host already has such abstractions as we have it for FSP systems.

-- 
Stewart Smith
OPAL Architect, IBM.