On 05/07/2012 09:44 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
On 05/07/2012 05:30 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
On 05/06/2012 09:39 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
On 05/06/2012 05:35 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
On 05/06/2012 08:11 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
libvirt is essentially the BMC for a virtual guest. I would suggest
looking at implementing an IPMI interface to libvirt and exposing it
to the guest through a USB RNDIS device.
That's the first option. One unanswered question is what to do when the
guest is down? Someone should listen for IPMI events, but we can't make
it libvirt unconditionally, since many instances of libvirt are active
at any one time.
Note the IPMI external interface needs to be migrated, like any other.
For all intents and purposes, the BMC/RSA is a separate physical
machine.
That's true for any other card on a machine.
It has a separate power source for all intents and purposes. If you think of it
in QOM terms, what connects the nodes together ultimately is the "Vcc" pin that
travels across all devices. The RTC is a little special because it has a
battery backed CMOS/clock but it's also handled specially.
The BMC does not share Vcc. It's no different than a separate physical box. It
just shares a couple buses.
If you really wanted to model it, you would launch two instances of
QEMU. The BMC instance would have a virtual NIC and would share a USB
bus with the slave QEMU instance (probably via USBoIP). The USB bus
is how the BMC exposes IPMI to the guest (via a USB rndis adapter),
remote media, etc. I believe some BMC's also expose IPMI over i2c but
that's pretty low bandwidth.
That is one way to do it. Figure out the interactions between two
different parts in a machine, define an interface for them to
communicate, and split them into two processes. We don't usually do
that; I believe your motivation is that the two have different power
domains (but then so do NICs with wake-on-LAN support).
The power still comes from the PCI bus.
Think of something like a blade center. Each individual blade does not have
it's own BMC. There's a single common BMC that provides an IPMI interface for
all blades. Yet each blade still sees an IPMI interface via a USB rndis device.
You can rip out the memory, PCI devices, etc. from a box while the Power is in
and the BMC will be unaffected.
At any rate, you would have some sort of virtual hardware device that
essentially spoke QMP to the slave instance. You could just do
virtio-serial and call it a day actually.
Sorry I lost you. Which is the master and which is the slave?
The BMC is the master, system being controlled is the slave.
It really boils down to what you are trying to do. If you want to
just get some piece of software working that expects to do IPMI, the
easiest thing to do is run IPMI in the host and use a USB rndis
interface to interact with it.
That would be most strange. A remote client connecting to the IPMI
interface would control the power level of the host, not the guest.
IPMI with a custom backend is what I mean. That's what I mean by an IPMI ->
libvirt bridge. You could build a libvirt client that exposes an IPMI interface
and when you issue IPMI commands, it translate it to libvirt operations.
This can run as a normal process on the host and then network it to the guest
via an emulated USB rndis device. Existing software on the guest shouldn't be
able to tell the difference as long as it doesn't try to use I2C to talk to the BMC.
I don't think there's a tremendous amount of value in QEMU making
itself look like an IBM IMM or whatever HP/Dell's equivalent is. As I
said, these stacks are hugely complicated and there are better ways of
doing out of band management (like talk to libvirt directly).
I have to agree here.
Regards,
Anthony Liguori
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