Ben Wei

PLDM (Platform Level Data Model) Type 5 defines a protocol and a set of commands supporting out of band firmware upgrade. In this talk I will go over PLDM protocol for firmware update, showing a typical upgrade flow, as well as how NC-SI v1.2 has added provisions to carry PLDM traffic over NC-SI/RBT. I will also go over some of the limitation that exists today when running PLDM over NC-SI/RBT, and how this can also support other PLDM types (for example, Type 2, PLDM for sensor monitoring) Lastly I will discuss what we have currently in OpenBMC codebase to support this feature and provide a sample flow.

NIC continues to be a single point failure for our platforms and this is especially true for multi-host platforms where we have a single Multi-host NIC managed by 1 BMC. On Tioga Pass & Yosemite V2 platform, we have added a user space daemon to monitor and manage NIC through NC-SI. One of its primary responsibility is to monitor link status and performs auto recovery and remediation as needed. We have also been working with NIC vendors on adding OEM NC-SI commands and OEM AENs for our use case. In this talk I will discuss how ncisd monitors NIC status and some of the work we did with NIC vendors to help BMC managing NIC, as well as other command line tools we use in OpenBMC to debug NIC issues.