Prem'Day: feedback on the first infra on-prem conference and creation of a user group by Erwan Velu

Prem'Day was a one-day conference in May from infrastructure users.

Many companies participated: server operators giving talks (Scaleway, i3d, Qarnot, Moji, Criteo), and server vendors (Dell, AMD, Intel HPE, Gigabyte, Supermicro, etc.) listening to all this feedback.

(with yours truly giving the opening talk)

Videos are available at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjPeZjanhgqW0P-F40DJYS3Pg0nGJlXUg

Every presentation talked about the firmware ecosystem and how it can be a pain when operating servers.

Having so many server buyers on stage giving feedback about the same issues had a bigger impact towards server vendors, because they can understand that it's a pervasive issue.

The conference was just the starting point: a User Group for Infra owners is the main goal, in order to have a point of contact to ease communication between vendors and their user communities. This user group will own and support the conference, in addition to working on various topics.

The group is currently organized on the Open Source Firmware slack channel #premday, and the next edition of the conference should be in 2025.

#OSFC #OSFC2024 #PremDay

"Operating system provided device-trees" by Heinrich Schuchardt

While it was not the initial goal, in practice, when booting Linux, device trees need to be coupled with a given kernel version.

This brings its own sets of challenge, because the bootloader needs to patch the device tree to provide information to the OS.

When using EFI, there is now the EFI_DT_FIXUP_PROTOCOL.

Outside of EFI, the flash-kernel tool helps picking the correct device tree depending on the board model.

The way forward would be to use Unified Kernel Images, which would contain all device trees for supported platform, with the efistub used to select the correct one.

#OSFC #OSFC2024 #DeviceTree

Next is "OpenBMC - The state of multi-host platform support" by Oliver Brewka

Multi-host in this context means having a single BMC managing multiple host nodes.

First multi-host system Yosemite appeared in 2015; the platform support was maintained in Meta-OpenBMC, and for the latest version it migrated to LF-OpenBMC.

One of the challenges was to go from a static to a dynamic design: the 1<->1 relation is broken, and the number of hosts might change (empty node slot). Changing the design in OpenBMC without breaking the many single-host platforms was the hard part.

As of lately, multi-host has been getting more attention in OpenBMC; Aspeed announced new multi-host capabilities for their next BMC SoC, for example.

Oliver says that multi-host in OpenBMC will improve the design, getting rid of much hard-coding, and getting closer the Redfish specification.

#OSFC #OSFC2024 #OpenBMC

Tom takes over to talk about the firmware update side of the AMC with OpenBMC.

At NVIDIA, they have strong KPIs for firmware update performance and reliability, while still using standard, PLDM type 5 firmware update with Redfish.

#OSFC #OSFC2024 #Redfish #OpenBMC