On Mar 3, 2009, at 3:04 PM, Cynthia McGuire wrote:
While I'm happy to see some convergence between x86 and SPARC, this project moves in the wrong direction. If I understand correctly, you are adopting the SPARC PRI for modeling the FMA topology on x86. This has been discussed before and it was decided that a better approach for all Sun platforms is to move toward adopting SMBIOS. SMBIOS (plus whatever you glean from ACPI) then becomes the source of FRU and other FMA topology information for things like libtopo and fmd(1M). Further, Sun needs to draft a SMBIOS standard for platform vendors wishing to participate in fault management and diagnosis for their platforms. Included in the standard should be the required records for the Sun FMA. If a vendor conforms (including Sun SPARC), diagnosis and FRU location and replacement is then guaranteed.
Argh, SMBIOS. There are two issues I have with heavily relying on SMBIOS:
1) A given system's SMBIOS accuracy and completeness (read: quality) can vary wildly from vendor to vendor and even within a single vendor's product line. This is the biggest problem with SMBIOS, I think. I've seen systems that don't register PCI slots as occupied, when they are, and others that don't populate memory slot information such as DIMM vendor IDs and serial numbers.
2) Aside from the general issue of having to chase the DMTF SMBIOS spec whenever it's rev'd, Solaris's smbios(7d) driver isn't currently the best w.r.t. decoding the whole of a given system's SMBIOS structures. I had a putback last year to bring it up to speed w.r.t. ID'ing newer RAM and CPU types, but there are still yet whole structures defined in SMBIOS 2.5 and 2.6 which aren't known to smbios(7d). Is there a RFE to address this if SMBIOS is going to be leaned on further?
One other thing I wonder, is how or if any info can be reconciled between a system's BMC and its SMBIOS repository. Will there be the necessary smarts to correlate, say, DIMM CE alerts from a system's SEL with the correct SMBIOS Physical Memory Array structure its related to?
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