[Freeipmi-devel] Re: FreeIPMI beta w/ BMC watchdog workaround for Sun machines

[Al Chu]

Hi Frank,

On Thu, 2010-12-23 at 06:53 -0800, Frank Steiner wrote:
> Dave Love wrote
> 
> > says ps, where I need the -D on x4100 or x4200m2 to avoid 
> > 
> >   bmc-watchdog:  Get Watchdog Timer Error: BMC Busy
>  
> Just ran into this (and -D openipmi didn't work for me) and figured out
> that the /etc/init.d/lm_sensors script loads the ipmi_si and ipmi_msghandler
> modules on our Sun machines. I didn't realize figure out the problem for 
> some time because the ipmi service itself was disabled in the runlevels
> and so I didn't even think of the kernel modules :-)
>
> Maybe a little warning from the bmc-watchdog binary when ipmi kernel modules
> are loaded when running on a Sun machine could help others to avoid this?

I'm not really sure what kind of error message could be portable and/or
reasonable.  From the perspective of most FreeIPMI software, any
driver/mechanism to reach the BMC card is ok.  If the OpenIPMI driver is
available, it can use it.

I'm not sure why (in this case) using the OpenIPMI kernel driver didn't
work.  Did you get any other error messages?  The predominant issue that
all IPMI software should try to avoid is using different drivers (e.g.
one tool uses /dev/ipmi0 and another uses memory mapped I/O from
userspace).  That can lead to issues.

Also, just to make sure, did you use the "ignorestateflag" workaround
when running bmc-watchdog?

Al

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