Corey, Carol -- Does a distribution in terms of patches against "v37" code even make sense? The code base that Matt has been working from is off of OpenIPMI v35; to patch to that from v37 is basically to rewind a bunch of previous patches. It seems like it might be better to declare it a fork at v35.
Anyway. Carol had hinted for me to speak up: > > We, and many other vendors I suspect (speak up now!), would be very > > grateful ... ... and I should have done that. I am working at one of those vendors who would benefit from an updated OpenIPMI-for-2.4 driver base. I don't "speak for" VMware so I hesitate to say something like "VMware would be grateful" -- subtle semantic point. Anyway. We have now integrated into the upcoming VMware 2.5.4 console OS kernel the version of OpenIPMI found in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 8, i.e. RHEL3U8. This is very close to the last version I saw on Matt Domsch's FTP repository; from memory, the only differences are one or two IBM patches in the motherboard-table-based BMC detection, and some minor changes to the locking calls. We had previously checked in some v37-based code with added patches, supplied to us by HP. We received that as pre-integrated sources so it's not easy for me to say exactly where the patches originated. Relative to v37, the patches added support for OEM channel messages and for HP's PCI BMC. I was not able to disentangle these patches and layer them onto the Domsch/RHEL3U8 "35.13" code base; nor did I have much fun trying to get Corey's PCI support stuff (http://lkml.org/lkml/diff/2006/3/21/429/1) integrated. I gave up on these because I felt that I was just destabilizing the driver, and the 35.13 code gained almost as much performance as the HP PCI patch. That is, on the HP PCI BMC it performed nearly as well; on any other BMC, it was miles ahead of the v37-based driver. Unfortunately, VMware ESX Server 3.0.0 did ship with the v37-based driver. The v35.13 code is supposed to be integrated in for an update, probably 3.0.2. Until then, OpenIPMI is problematic on ESX 3 except on HP PCI BMC systems. I hope to eventually converge on something 35.13-based + proper PCI interrupt support + OEM channel messages + whatever other goodness might be pulled out of the current 2.6 "v39" driver. But I'm fairly happy where I am right now, without integrating all that and destabilizing. I'd like to thank Corey for so much work on the driver over the years, Matt for his more recent life support work on 2.4, and Carol for trying to get something going here... >Bela< -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Carol Hebert Sent: Tue 2006-08-08 2:55 PM To: openipmi-developer@lists.sourceforge.net Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Openipmi-developer] Openipmi-developer Digest, Vol 2, Issue 11 Hi Corey, We've been looking into what we can do to help facilitate this next 2.4 patch set and your suggestion that we send diffs from the v37 driver and had a couple of questions: First, which kernels would you want to have patch sets for? We've only been working on this issue with the 2.4.21 kernel but there appear to be patch sets for 3 different 2.4 kernels posted for v37. Would you need to have us supply diffs/patches for all 3 kernels? Second, would it be possible to post a pointer to Matt's dkms website on the 2.4 driver download page? Although Matt has several times posted a pointer to this website on the mailing list, customers probably don't know to dig through the mail archives to find it. Thank you very much again for your consideration and help with this issue. Carol Hebert LTC System x Enablement IBM Corp. > Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 19:18:54 -0500 > From: Corey Minyard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Re: [Openipmi-developer] Need help with OpenIPMI 2.4 kernel > support > To: Carol Hebert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Cc: openipmi-developer@lists.sourceforge.net, Matt Domsch > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > > I'll have to think about this. I don't really view this as a "one more > release" type of thing. There's always one more thing to do. Instead, I > view this as a support issue. Do I support 2.4, or not? > > I'm pressed for time over the near future, so it will be difficult for > me to do this. If you could get the pieces you need working and send me > a diff from the v37 driver, that would probably be the easiest. This > will also require work from Matt to package things up; I don't know if > he is able to do this. > > -Corey > > Carol Hebert wrote: > > Hi Corey, > > > > We have a critical situation concerning our IBM System x customers who > > are running RHEL3U6 and other 2.4 distro kernels that do not contain the > > IPMI driver "speed-up" fixes Matt Domsch posted for RHEL3U7 (Red Hat BZ > > #168358, #168795) and for the 2.6 kernel on SourceForge. Without Matt's > > fixes, our Flash utility takes upward of 2.5 hours to complete which is > > considered unusable for our customers due to the danger a flash of that > > time length poses to our customers' BMCs. > > > > I've seen your note posted with the v37 driver that it will be your last > > 2.4 maintenance release but I was wondering if we might ask you to > > reconsider and post one more patch set which contains Matt's speed-up > > fixes and some of the other critical fixes which haven't yet been posted > > for 2.4 in v37? Our team is not in a position to be able to take on the > > maintenance and support role for "v38" as your v37 note suggested > > someone do but would be willing to help put a patch together. > > > > We are hoping that the mileage Matt's speed-up patch has already put in > > on RHEL3U7 will suffice to a certain extent in proving the patch's > > correctness and stability since we have only System x boxes on which to > > test the patch. > > > > We, and many other vendors I suspect (speak up now!), would be very > > grateful to you if you would consider posting one more version of the > > OpenIPMI driver on SourceForge for 2.4 kernels. Please let me know what > > we can do to help make this last 2.4 patch set happen. > > > > Thank you very much for your consideration of this critical matter, > > > > Carol Hebert > > LTC System x Enablement > > IBM Corp. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? 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