[Freeipmi-devel] Re: what's the relationship between freeipmi and openipmi?

[Albert Chu]

Hi Cory,

For the most part they are separate projects.  (Note to A.B. and myself,
maybe we should put a history/description thingie on the webpage.  I'll
try write something up.)  

FreeIPMI got its major push from the Thunder cluster at LLNL (1024 node
Itanium2 cluster).  At the time (starting mid 2003) vendor tools and the
other IPMI open source projects wouldn't have worked out for Thunder. 
There were either too much in their infancy and flat out didin't work
(OpenIPMI kernel driver), didn't meet our userpace HPC/enterprise
expectations (OpenIPMI userspace tools, ipmiutil).  Ipmitool didn't
exist yet (or started at the same time, nevertheless, it too was too
much in its infancy).

In hindsight, could we have worked the other projects to meet our
needs??  Perhaps.  But that was over 2 years ago and the IPMI community
(not to mention our knowledge of IPMI) was still in its infancy too.

Anyways, that lead to FreeIPMI's development and existence.  Atleast at
LLNL, we feel that it provides us with several of the HPC needs we require.

For example:

1) Working in conjunction with Powerman, ipmipower currently power
queries 1024 nodes in 0.3 seconds.

2) Bmc-config and its --checkout/--checkin feature allow us to
re-configure 1024 nodes BMC's in under a minute.

Hope that answers some of your questions.

Al Chu

--
Albert Chu
address@hidden
Computer Scientist
High Performance Systems Division
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory


----- Original Message -----
From: coly li <address@hidden>
Date: Sunday, December 11, 2005 3:33 pm
Subject: what's the relationship between freeipmi and openipmi?

> Chu:
> 
> I followed openipmi maillist since 2002, now openipmi also is about to
> support ipmi 2.0. so, I wander what's the relationship between 
> freeipmiand openipmi, where is the different.
> 
> best regards.
> 
> Coly
> 
>