Re: [Qemu-devel] Adding an IPMI BMC device to KVM

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

On 05/07/2012 01:07 PM, Corey Minyard wrote:
> I think we are getting a little out of hand here, and we are mixing up concepts :).
>
> There are lots of things IPMI *can* do (including serial access, VGA snooping,
> LAN access, etc.) but I don't see any value it that. The main thing here is to
> emulate the interface to the guest. OOB management is really more appropriately
> handled with libvirt. How the BMC integrates into the hardware varies a *lot*
> between systems, but it's really kind of irrelevant. (Well, almost irrelevant,
> BMCs can provide a direct I2C messaging capability, and that may matter.)
>
> A guest can have one (or more) of a number of interfaces (that are all fairly
> bad, unfortunately). The standard ones are called "KCS", "BT" and "SMIC" and
> they generally are directly on the ISA bus, but are in memory on non-x86 boxes
> (and on some x86 boxes) and sometimes on the PCI bus. Some systems also have
> interfaces over I2C, but that hasn't really caught on. Others have interfaces
> over serial ports, and that unfortunately has caught on in the ATCA world. And
> there are at least 3 different basic types of serial port interfaces with
> sub-variants :(. I'm not sure what the USB rndis device is, but I'll look at it.
> But there is no IPMI over USB.

USB rndis == USB network adapater.  It's just seen by the machine as IPMI over LAN.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori