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

[Albert Chu]

Hey Frank,

On Fri, 2011-01-14 at 05:12 -0800, Frank Steiner wrote:
> Al Chu wrote
> 
> >> 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 think I have misunderstood your reply to Dave. I thought that the sun BMCs
> had general problems whenever the kernel modules are loaded.

The later statement might be true, they might have problems on the suns.
My point was that FreeIPMI can't really tell that (atleast at this
moment).  FreeIPMI sees a driver available (e.g. /dev/ipmi0) and assumes
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
> 
> I just figured out what was wrong: When calling "/etc/init.d/ipmi start"
> I can use "-D OPENIPMI". After calling "/etc/init.d/ipmi stop" I can
> use bmc-watchdog without -D.
> 
> Problem here was that starting lm_sensors from the runlevel loads only
> some of the ipmi kernel modules. Not enough to make "-D openipmi" work,
> but enough to cause many delays and "busy" problems when calling
> bmc-watchdog without -D.
> Thus: loading all or none ipmi kernel modules works (with/without -D),
> but only some of them causes both methods to fail.

Ahhh.  That's nasty.  I'm not really sure why that would be the case.  I
would think that lm_sensors would load all the modules appropriately.  I
would report this as a bug to the appropriate people at Sun/Redhat/Suse
or whoever.  That's quite nasty.

Al

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