Hello to OpenBMC Team

Hello to OpenBMC Team

[Garrett, Mike (HPE Server Firmware)]

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Hello OpenBMC team,

My name is Mike Garrett and I work with a team at Hewlett Packard Enterprise creating a port of OpenBMC on our server hardware.  We have just signed the CCLA (attached) and uploaded it.  We look forward to working with the OpenBMC community.

To introduce myself, I am a firmware architect in HPE's compute group with a background in BIOS and BMC firmware.  There will be a few other folks on our team working with me, all with BMC development experience.

The team has created a port of OpenBMC for our DL360 2-socket 1U rack server that runs in place of our iLO 5 firmware.  This has been shown as a proof of concept at a few venues including most recently the OCP Virtual Summit a couple of weeks ago.  Jean-Marie Verdun has used this proof of concept as the underlying hardware for an Open Source Firmware CI system.  We hope to the upstream the OpenBMC work soon.

I believe the next request is to ask for team members to be added to the gerrit system?

Here is our HPE team (at this point):

Mike Garrett - mike.garrett@hpe.com<mailto:mike.garrett@hpe.com>
Jorge Cisneros - jorge.cisneros@hpe.com<mailto:jorge.cisneros@hpe.com>
Gilbert Chen - gilbert.chen@hpe.com<mailto:gilbert.chen@hpe.com>
John Chung - john.chung@hpe.com<mailto:john.chung@hpe.com>
Edward Newman - edward.newman@hpe.com<mailto:edward.newman@hpe.com>
Renee Rodgers - renee.rodgers@hpe.com<mailto:renee.rodgers@hpe.com>
Jean-Marie Verdun - jean-marie.verdun@hpe.com<mailto:jean-marie.verdun@hpe.com>

Please let me know if there is anything else needed.

Regards,

Mike Garrett



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Re: Hello to OpenBMC Team

[Brad Bishop]

On Tue, 2020-06-02 at 20:56 +0000, Garrett, Mike (HPE Server Firmware)
wrote:
> Hello OpenBMC team,
> 
> My name is Mike Garrett and I work with a team at Hewlett Packard 

Welcome Mike and HPE.


> Enterprise creating a port of OpenBMC on our server hardware.  We have
> just signed the CCLA (attached) and uploaded it.  We look forward to
> working with the OpenBMC community.

Likewise!

> 
> To introduce myself, I am a firmware architect in HPE's compute group
> with a background in BIOS and BMC firmware.  There will be a few other
> folks on our team working with me, all with BMC development
> experience.
> 
> The team has created a port of OpenBMC for our DL360 2-socket 1U rack
> server that runs in place of our iLO 5 firmware.

Is this https://github.com/HewlettPackard/openbmc?  Thanks for leaving
the attribution to the upstream project ("forked from openbmc/openbmc").

> This has been shown as a proof of concept at a few venues including
> most recently the OCP Virtual Summit a couple of weeks ago.  Jean-
> Marie Verdun has used this proof of concept as the underlying hardware
> for an Open Source Firmware CI system.  We hope to the upstream the
> OpenBMC work soon.

Awesome!

> 
> I believe the next request is to ask for team members to be added to
> the gerrit system?

All you need to log in to Gerrit and submit code is a github account.

To have your code automatically tested by the CI system, you do need to
be on an ACL - I'll set that up as soon as you log into gerrit.

thx - brad

RE: Hello to OpenBMC Team

[Garrett, Mike (HPE Server Firmware)]

Hi Brad,

Our thinking is to set up public forks "close to home" that we can work rapidly in and simultaneously work to upstream patches for U-boot, Linux, and OpenBMC to the main repos.  The forks are currently unmodified but that will change soon as we start moving our mods out of our private repos.

I should be clear that the DL360s we are using are modified from the off-the-self HPE Gen10 servers because of our silicon root of trust technology.  The CI system that Jean-Marie has set up is one of these modified systems.

Thanks,

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: Brad Bishop [mailto:bradleyb@fuzziesquirrel.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 3, 2020 2:24 PM
To: Garrett, Mike (HPE Server Firmware) <mike.garrett@hpe.com>; openbmc@lists.ozlabs.org
Cc: Shaffer, Scott <scott.shaffer@hpe.com>; Verdun, Jean-Marie <jean-marie.verdun@hpe.com>; Cisneros, Jorge (George) <jorge.cisneros@hpe.com>; Rodgers, Renee <renee.rodgers@hpe.com>; Chung, John (TWN iLO) <john.chung@hpe.com>; Chen, Gilbert <gilbert.chen@hpe.com>; Newman, Edward (iLO Firmware) <edward.newman@hpe.com>
Subject: Re: Hello to OpenBMC Team

On Tue, 2020-06-02 at 20:56 +0000, Garrett, Mike (HPE Server Firmware)
wrote:
> Hello OpenBMC team,
> 
> My name is Mike Garrett and I work with a team at Hewlett Packard

Welcome Mike and HPE.


> Enterprise creating a port of OpenBMC on our server hardware.  We have 
> just signed the CCLA (attached) and uploaded it.  We look forward to 
> working with the OpenBMC community.

Likewise!

> 
> To introduce myself, I am a firmware architect in HPE's compute group 
> with a background in BIOS and BMC firmware.  There will be a few other 
> folks on our team working with me, all with BMC development 
> experience.
> 
> The team has created a port of OpenBMC for our DL360 2-socket 1U rack 
> server that runs in place of our iLO 5 firmware.

Is this https://github.com/HewlettPackard/openbmc?  Thanks for leaving the attribution to the upstream project ("forked from openbmc/openbmc").

> This has been shown as a proof of concept at a few venues including 
> most recently the OCP Virtual Summit a couple of weeks ago.  Jean- 
> Marie Verdun has used this proof of concept as the underlying hardware 
> for an Open Source Firmware CI system.  We hope to the upstream the 
> OpenBMC work soon.

Awesome!

> 
> I believe the next request is to ask for team members to be added to 
> the gerrit system?

All you need to log in to Gerrit and submit code is a github account.

To have your code automatically tested by the CI system, you do need to be on an ACL - I'll set that up as soon as you log into gerrit.

thx - brad

Re: Hello to OpenBMC Team

[Brad Bishop]

On Wed, 2020-06-03 at 19:36 +0000, Garrett, Mike (HPE Server Firmware)
wrote:
> Hi Brad,
> 
> Our thinking is to set up public forks "close to home" that we can
> work rapidly in 

That makes sense - my dream is that someday everyone could work rapidly
directly in upstream.  We have work to do to get there for sure.    If
ideas come up that could make the situation better please share them
here on the list.

I think it works best for everyone involved when you can commit to
working directly upstream, first.  My observation is that it is
extremely difficult to circle back and incorporate community feedback
after you have something that works for you.  That can lead to problems
like the code not being accepted or introducing fragmentation into the
project.

But I understand that can be really hard and conflicting internal
business pressures are often mitigated with techniques like the one you
have described.  My company maintains forks too.

One last opine just in case its helpful - like security, working in
upstream first isn't boolean - it is a spectrum.  Where an organization
(or a single developer) lands on that spectrum is one element of what
separates those with influence over others from those without.

> and simultaneously work to upstream patches for U-boot, Linux, and
> OpenBMC to the main repos.  

Great!  Looking forward to working with you and the team on that.

thx -brad

Re: Hello to OpenBMC Team

[Verdun, Jean-Marie]

Hi Brad,

I realize that we are not in the best condition. We faced multiple challenges before being able to arrive to such stage. The first one is a chicken and egg issue, related to the need to create some momentum inside HPE to be able to start working on a project like OpenBMC. To reach it we had to create a Proof of Concept, which needed that we worked on our GXP asic support and introduce patches into the original source tree that we forked. At the PoC level, we still could have ended up into a situation where we would have dropped the work.

We used that PoC to demonstrate the value of OpenBMC on top of our hardware to public and private customers, leading to a green light to join the project. 

I know very well the pain to maintain a fork of a project, and I believe most of the HPE team also. We will work pretty hard at the early stage of the project to upstream what is needed just to be sure that we do not end up into a complex situation. My ideal goal is always to commit upstream instead into a fork, and I share your concerns. We will probably have a rollercoaster ride at the beginning due to the amount of code to introduce, but we are ready to adapt to the community needs.

I do contribute to other projects like FreeCAD, which are huge piece of code, and maintain the snap of it. So forking is never a good idea, except if you want to build a separate project, which is clearly not our intend ! We want to be part of this community, and make its software works properly on our systems.

We do have an alpha loan program which will start soon also, and we would like to support it "publicaly" allowing its members to rebuild openbmc and linuxboot image from code which are available on github, this also explain the tight schedule we follow.

Last but not least, I am trying to automatize as much as we can, build and testing on HPE hardware through our public interactive CI which is under active development. The tool intend to take as an input a github repo, a branch and build a functional openbmc/linuxboot image as an output which will be automatically ran on a live hardware machine. It is available on https://osfci.tech and https://github.com/hewlettpackard/osfci. The code is still a lot buggy, but I am progressing on a daily basis.

One of the main advantage of it, is that you do not need to be seated closed to real hardware to test on real hardware. I have also included a build machine with a lot of core and memory, so we could batch build images. If needed we could try to find a way to share it as a build systems into OpenBMC Jenkins.

By the way Brad, do you think we could create a meta-hpe into the tree ?

vejmarie

On 6/4/20, 10:59 AM, "openbmc on behalf of Brad Bishop" <openbmc-bounces+jean-marie.verdun=hpe.com@lists.ozlabs.org on behalf of bradleyb@fuzziesquirrel.com> wrote:

    On Wed, 2020-06-03 at 19:36 +0000, Garrett, Mike (HPE Server Firmware)
    wrote:
    > Hi Brad,
    > 
    > Our thinking is to set up public forks "close to home" that we can
    > work rapidly in 

    That makes sense - my dream is that someday everyone could work rapidly
    directly in upstream.  We have work to do to get there for sure.    If
    ideas come up that could make the situation better please share them
    here on the list.

    I think it works best for everyone involved when you can commit to
    working directly upstream, first.  My observation is that it is
    extremely difficult to circle back and incorporate community feedback
    after you have something that works for you.  That can lead to problems
    like the code not being accepted or introducing fragmentation into the
    project.

    But I understand that can be really hard and conflicting internal
    business pressures are often mitigated with techniques like the one you
    have described.  My company maintains forks too.

    One last opine just in case its helpful - like security, working in
    upstream first isn't boolean - it is a spectrum.  Where an organization
    (or a single developer) lands on that spectrum is one element of what
    separates those with influence over others from those without.

    > and simultaneously work to upstream patches for U-boot, Linux, and
    > OpenBMC to the main repos.  

    Great!  Looking forward to working with you and the team on that.

    thx -brad

Re: Hello to OpenBMC Team

[Brad Bishop]

On Thu, 2020-06-04 at 17:36 +0000, Verdun, Jean-Marie wrote:
> Hi Brad,
> 
> I realize that we are not in the best condition. We faced multiple
> challenges before being able to arrive to such stage. The first one is
> a chicken and egg issue, related to the need to create some momentum
> inside HPE to be able to start working on a project like OpenBMC. To
> reach it we had to create a Proof of Concept, which needed that we
> worked on our GXP asic support and introduce patches into the original
> source tree that we forked. At the PoC level, we still could have
> ended up into a situation where we would have dropped the work.
> 
> We used that PoC to demonstrate the value of OpenBMC on top of our
> hardware to public and private customers, leading to a green light to
> join the project. 
> 
> I know very well the pain to maintain a fork of a project, and I
> believe most of the HPE team also. We will work pretty hard at the
> early stage of the project to upstream what is needed just to be sure
> that we do not end up into a complex situation. My ideal goal is
> always to commit upstream instead into a fork, and I share your
> concerns. We will probably have a rollercoaster ride at the beginning
> due to the amount of code to introduce, but we are ready to adapt to
> the community needs.
> 
> I do contribute to other projects like FreeCAD, which are huge piece
> of code, and maintain the snap of it. So forking is never a good idea,
> except if you want to build a separate project, which is clearly not
> our intend ! We want to be part of this community, and make its
> software works properly on our systems.

Great!  It sounds like we are on the same page and I'm glad you were
able to build the momentum necessary to get here.

> We do have an alpha loan program which will start soon also, and we
> would like to support it "publicaly" allowing its members to rebuild
> openbmc and linuxboot image from code which are available on github,
> this also explain the tight schedule we follow.
> 
> Last but not least, I am trying to automatize as much as we can, build
> and testing on HPE hardware through our public interactive CI which is
> under active development. The tool intend to take as an input a github
> repo, a branch and build a functional openbmc/linuxboot image as an
> output which will be automatically ran on a live hardware machine. It
> is available on https://osfci.tech and 
> https://github.com/hewlettpackard/osfci. The code is still a lot
> buggy, but I am progressing on a daily basis.
> 
> One of the main advantage of it, is that you do not need to be seated
> closed to real hardware to test on real hardware. I have also included
> a build machine with a lot of core and memory, so we could batch build
> images. If needed we could try to find a way to share it as a build
> systems into OpenBMC Jenkins.

This sounds exciting.  Public, automated testing on real hardware would
be a great addition.

> By the way Brad, do you think we could create a meta-hpe into the tree
> ?

Yes.  meta-hpe created.

-brad

Re: Hello to OpenBMC Team

[krtaylor]

On 6/2/20 3:56 PM, Garrett, Mike (HPE Server Firmware) wrote:
> Hello OpenBMC team,
> 
> My name is Mike Garrett and I work with a team at Hewlett Packard 
> Enterprise creating a port of OpenBMC on our server hardware.  We have 
> just signed the CCLA (attached) and uploaded it.  We look forward to 
> working with the OpenBMC community.

Welcome HPE!

I've worked with several great HPE engineers over the years, most 
recently on OpenStack (Bruno with Redfish).

Thanks for uploading your CCLA, it looks fine and saves me having to do 
it. :)

Kurt Taylor (krtaylor)

> 
> To introduce myself, I am a firmware architect in HPE’s compute group 
> with a background in BIOS and BMC firmware.  There will be a few other 
> folks on our team working with me, all with BMC development experience.
> 
> The team has created a port of OpenBMC for our DL360 2-socket 1U rack 
> server that runs in place of our iLO 5 firmware.  This has been shown as 
> a proof of concept at a few venues including most recently the OCP 
> Virtual Summit a couple of weeks ago.  Jean-Marie Verdun has used this 
> proof of concept as the underlying hardware for an Open Source Firmware 
> CI system.  We hope to the upstream the OpenBMC work soon.
> 
> I believe the next request is to ask for team members to be added to the 
> gerrit system?
> 
> Here is our HPE team (at this point):
> 
> Mike Garrett – mike.garrett@hpe.com <mailto:mike.garrett@hpe.com>
> 
> Jorge Cisneros – jorge.cisneros@hpe.com <mailto:jorge.cisneros@hpe.com>
> 
> Gilbert Chen - gilbert.chen@hpe.com <mailto:gilbert.chen@hpe.com>
> 
> John Chung - john.chung@hpe.com <mailto:john.chung@hpe.com>
> 
> Edward Newman - edward.newman@hpe.com <mailto:edward.newman@hpe.com>
> 
> Renee Rodgers - renee.rodgers@hpe.com <mailto:renee.rodgers@hpe.com>
> 
> Jean-Marie Verdun - jean-marie.verdun@hpe.com 
> <mailto:jean-marie.verdun@hpe.com>
> 
> Please let me know if there is anything else needed.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Mike Garrett
>