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Created: Mar 15, 2022
We've identified use cases where the BIOS will go into System Management Mode (SMM) to provide error logs to the BMC, requiring messages to be sent as quickly as possible without a handshake / ack back from the BMC due to the time constraint that it's under. The goal of this daemon we are proposing is to implement a circular buffer over a shared BIOS->BMC buffer that the BIOS can fire-and-forget.
There are various ways of communicating between the BMC and the BIOS, but there are only a few that don't require a handshake and lets the data persist in shared memory. These will be listed in the "Alternatives Considered" section.
Different BMC vendors support different methods such as Shared Memory (SHM, via LPC / eSPI) and P2A or PCI Mailbox, but the existing daemon that utilizes them do it over IPMI blob to communicate where and how much data has been transferred (see phosphor-ipmi-flash and libmctp/astlpc)
The fundamental requirements for this daemon are listed as follows:
The shared buffer will be as big as the protocol allows for a given BMC platform (for Nuvoton's PCI Mailbox for NPCM 7xx as an example, 16KB) and each of the payloads is estimated to be less than 1KB.
This daemon assumes that no other traffic will communicate through the given protocol. The circular buffer and its header will provide some protection against corruption, but it should not be relied upon.
The implementation of interfacing with the shared buffer will very closely follow phosphor-ipmi-flash. In the future, it may be wise to extract out the PCI Mailbox, P2A and LPC as separate libraries shared between phosphor-ipmi-flash and this daemon to reduce duplication of code.
Taken from Marco's (mcruzheredia@google.com) internal design document for the circular buffer, the data structure of its header will look like the following:
| Name | Size | Offset | Written by | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BMC Interface Version | 4 bytes | 0x0 | BMC at init | Allows the BIOS to determine if it is compatible with the BMC |
| BIOS Interface Version | 4 bytes | 0x4 | BIOS at init | Allows the BMC to determine if it is compatible with the BIOS |
| Magic Number | 16 bytes | 0x8 | BMC at init | Magic number to set the state of the queue as described below. Written by BMC once the memory region is ready to be used. Must be checked by BIOS before logging. BMC can change this number when it suspects data corruption to prevent BIOS from writing anything during reinitialization |
| Queue size | 3 bytes | 0x18 | BMC at init | Indicates the size of the region allocated for the circular queue. Written by BMC on init only, should not change during runtime. This includes the size of the header and UE region size |
| Uncorrectable Error region size | 2 bytes | 0x1b | BMC at init | Indicates the size of the region reserved for Uncorrectable Error (UE) logs. Written by BMC on init only, should not change during runtime |
| BMC flags | 4 bytes | 0x1d | BMC | BIT0 - BMC UE reserved region “switch”Toggled when BMC reads a UE from the reserved region.BIT1 - OverflowLets BIOS know BMC has seen the overflow incidentToggled when BMC acks the overflow incidentBIT2 - BMC_READYBMC sets this bit once it has received any initialization information it needs to get from the BIOS before it’s ready to receive logs. |
| BMC read pointer | 3 bytes | 0x21 | BMC | Used to allow the BIOS to detect when the BMC was unable to read the previous error logs in time to prevent the circular buffer from overflowing. |
| Padding | 4 bytes | 0x24 | Reserved | Padding for 8 byte alignment |
| BIOS flags | 4 bytes | 0x28 | BIOS | BIT0 - BIOS UE reserved region “switch” Toggled when BIOS writes a UE to the reserved region.BIT1 - OverflowLets the BMC know that it missed an error logToggled when BIOS sees overflow and not already overflowedBIT2 - Incomplete InitializationSet when BIOS has attempted to initialize but did not see BMC ack back with BMC_READY bit in BMC flags |
| BIOS write pointer | 3 bytes | 0x2c | BIOS | Indicates where the next log will be written by BIOS. Used to tell BMC when it should read a new log |
| Padding | 1 byte | 0x2f | Reserved | Padding for 8 byte alignment |
| Uncorrectable Error reserved region | TBD1 | 0x30 | BIOS | Reserved region only for UE logs. This region is only used if the rest of the buffer is going to overflow and there is no unread UE log already in the region. |
| Error Logs from BIOS | Size of the Buffer - 0x30 - TBD1 | 0x30 + TBD1 | BIOS | Logs vary by type, so each log will self-describe with a header. This region will fill up the rest of the buffer |
This daemon will first initialize the shared buffer by writing zero to the whole buffer, then initializing the header's BMC at init fields before writing the Magic Number. Once the Magic Number is written to, the BIOS will assume that the shared buffer has been properly initialized, and will be able to start writing entries to it.
If there are any further initialization between the BIOS and the BMC required, the BMC needs to set the BMC_READY bit in the BMC flags once the initialization completes. If the BIOS does not see the flag being set, the BIOS shall set the Incomplete Initialization flag to notify the BMC to reinitialize the buffer.
This daemon will poll the buffer at a set interval (the exact number will be configurable as the processing time and performance of different platforms may require different polling rate) and once a new payload is detected, the payload will be processed by a library that can also be chosen and configured at compile-time.
Note that the Uncorrectable Error logs have a reserved region as they contain critical information that we don't want to lose, and should be prioritized over normal error logs. This reserved region will be used to log a UE log only if an overflow of the normal error log queue is imminent and the BMC has acked that any preexisting UE log in this region has already been read using Bit0 of the BMC flag.
An example of a processing library (and something we would like to push in our initial version of this daemon) would be an RDE decoder for processing a subset of Redfish Device Enablement (RDE) commands, and decoding its attached Binary Encoded JSON (BEJ) payloads.
libmctp and MCTP PCIe VDM were considered.libmctp's current implementation relies on LPC as the transport binding and IPMI KCS for synchronization. LPC as discussed, does not fit our current need and synchronization does not work.Reading from the buffer and processing it may hinder performance of the BMC, especially if the polling rate is set too high.
This design will require 2 repositories:
Unit tests will cover each parts of the daemon, mainly: