OpenBMC platform communication channel: MCTP & PLDM

Author: Jeremy Kerr jk@ozlabs.org

Problem Description

Currently, we have a few different methods of communication between host and BMC. This is primarily IPMI-based, but also includes a few hardware-specific side-channels, like hiomap. On OpenPOWER hardware at least, we've definitely started to hit some of the limitations of IPMI (for example, we have need for >255 sensors), as well as the hardware channels that IPMI typically uses.

This design aims to use the Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) to provide a common transport layer over the multiple channels that OpenBMC platforms provide. Then, on top of MCTP, we have the opportunity to move to newer host/BMC messaging protocols to overcome some of the limitations we've encountered with IPMI.

Background and References

Separating the "transport" and "messaging protocol" parts of the current stack allows us to design these parts separately. Currently, IPMI defines both of these; we currently have BT and KCS (both defined as part of the IPMI 2.0 standard) as the transports, and IPMI itself as the messaging protocol.

Some efforts of improving the hardware transport mechanism of IPMI have been attempted, but not in a cross-implementation manner so far. This does not address some of the limitations of the IPMI data model.

MCTP defines a standard transport protocol, plus a number of separate physical layer bindings for the actual transport of MCTP packets. These are defined by the DMTF's Platform Management Working group; standards are available at:

https://www.dmtf.org/standards/pmci

The following diagram shows how these standards map to the areas of functionality that we may want to implement for OpenBMC. The DSP numbers provided are references to DMTF standard documents.

One of the key concepts here is that separation of transport protocol from the physical layer bindings; this means that an MCTP "stack" may be using either a I2C, PCI, Serial or custom hardware channel, without the higher layers of that stack needing to be aware of the hardware implementation. These higher levels only need to be aware that they are communicating with a certain entity, defined by an Entity ID (MCTP EID). These entities may be any element of the platform that communicates over MCTP - for example, the host device, the BMC, or any other system peripheral - static or hot-pluggable.

This document is focussed on the "transport" part of the platform design. While this does enable new messaging protocols (mainly PLDM), those components are not covered in detail much; we will propose those parts in separate design efforts. For example, the PLDM design at [pldm-stack.md].

As part of the design, the references to MCTP "messages" and "packets" are intentional, to match the definitions in the MCTP standard. MCTP messages are the higher-level data transferred between MCTP endpoints, which packets are typically smaller, and are what is sent over the hardware. Messages that are larger than the hardware Maximum Transmit Unit (MTU) are split into individual packets by the transmit implementation, and reassembled at the receive implementation.

Requirements

Any channel between host and BMC should:

  • Have a simple serialisation and deserialisation format, to enable implementations in host firmware, which have widely varying runtime capabilities

  • Allow different hardware channels, as we have a wide variety of target platforms for OpenBMC

  • Be usable over simple hardware implementations, but have a facility for higher bandwidth messaging on platforms that require it.

  • Ideally, integrate with newer messaging protocols

Proposed Design

The MCTP core specification just provides the packetisation, routing and addressing mechanisms. The actual transmit/receive of those packets is up to the hardware binding of the MCTP transport.

For OpenBMC, we would introduce a "MCTP+applications" daemon, which implements the transport over a configurable hardware channel (eg., Serial UART, I2C or PCI), and provides handlers for any incoming MCTP application requests. This daemon is responsible for the packetisation and routing of MCTP messages from external endpoints, and handling the application layer requests.

This daemon has a few components:

  1. the core MCTP stack

  2. one or more binding implementations (eg, MCTP-over-serial), which interact with the hardware channel(s).

  3. one or more MCTP message handlers (eg PLDM or NVME-MI), to handle incoming MCTP messages of specific types

  4. the core application, consisting of main loop, handler management and MCTP binding management

The proposed implementation here is to produce an MCTP "library" which provides the packetisation and routing functions, between:

  • an "upper" messaging transmit/receive interface, for tx/rx of a full message to a specific endpoint (ie, (1) above)

  • a "lower" hardware binding for transmit/receive of individual packets, providing a method for the core to tx/rx each packet to hardware, and defines the parameters of the common packetisation code (ie. (2) above).

The lower interface would be plugged in to one of a number of hardware-specific binding implementations. Most of these would be included in the library source tree, but others can be plugged-in too, perhaps where the physical layer implementation does not make sense to include in the platform-agnostic library.

The reason for a library is to allow the same MCTP implementation to be used in both OpenBMC and host firmware; the library should be bidirectional. To allow this, the library would be written in portable C (structured in a way that can be compiled as "extern C" in C++ codebases), and be able to be configured to suit those runtime environments (for example, POSIX IO may not be available on all platforms; we should be able to compile the library to suit). The licence for the library should also allow this re-use; a dual Apache & GPLv2+ licence may be best.

These "lower" binding implementations may have very different methods of transferring packets to the physical layer. For example, a serial binding implementation for running on a Linux environment may be implemented through read()/write() syscalls to a PTY device. An I2C binding for use in low-level host firmware environments may interact directly with hardware registers to perform packet transfers.

The application-specific handlers (listed as (3) above) implement the actual functionality provided over the MCTP channel. Each of these would register with the MCTP core library to receive MCTP messages of a certain type, and would transmit MCTP messages of that same type. While the handlers themselves are out of scope for this design, there are a few elements that are important here:

  • Handlers are likely to perform IO to other components of the BMC (such as sending and receiving dbus messages). To allow multiple handlers to co-exist, this IO should be implemented using non-blocking interfaces (eg, using poll()).

  • Handlers should be implemented as separate components from the main daemon, so as not to require completely separate functionality (such as PLDM and NVME-MI) existing in the same codebase. Having the core daemon load handlers as shared objects would allow this.

MCTP is intended to be an optional component of OpenBMC. Platforms using OpenBMC are free to adopt it as they see fit.

Alternatives Considered

There have been two main alternatives to this approach:

Continue using IPMI, but start making more use of OEM extensions to suit the requirements of new platforms. However, given that the IPMI standard is no longer under active development, we would likely end up with a large amount of platform-specific customisations. This also does not solve the hardware channel issues in a standard manner.

Redfish between host and BMC. This would mean that host firmware needs a HTTP client, a TCP/IP stack, a JSON (de)serialiser, and support for Redfish schema. While this may be present in some environments (for example, UEFI-based firmware), this is may not be feasible for all host firmware implementations (for example, OpenPOWER). It's possible that we could run a simplified Redfish stack - indeed, MCTP has a proposal for a Redfish-over-MCTP channel (DSP0218), which uses simplified serialisation format and no requirement on HTTP. However, this may involve a large amount of complexity in host firmware.

In terms of an MCTP daemon implementation, an alternative is to have the core MCTP stack exist in a different process from the application handlers. For example, the MCTP core could be only responsible for proxying MCTP messages to and from a dbus interface, as is currently done for IPMI messages. However, the complexity, messaging overheads and state management involved here has indicated that the added separation has not been a clear advantage.

Impacts

Development would be required to implement the MCTP transport, plus any new users of the MCTP messaging (eg, a PLDM implementation). These would somewhat duplicate the work we have in IPMI handlers.

We'd want to keep IPMI running in parallel, so the "upgrade" path should be fairly straightforward.

Design and development needs to involve potential host, management controllers and managed device implementations.

Testing

For the core MCTP library, we are able to run tests there in complete isolation (I have already been able to run a prototype MCTP stack through the afl fuzzer) to ensure that the core transport protocol works.

For MCTP hardware bindings, we would develop channel-specific tests that would be run in CI on both host and BMC.

For the OpenBMC MCTP daemon implementation, testing models would depend on the structure we adopt in the design section.