Re: SATA hotplug notifications for BMC inventory updates

[Paul Fertser <fercerpav@gmail.com>]

(skipped discussion about SMI, as I guess an SMI handler can't
meaningfully communicate with the BMC anyway since that would add an
unacceptable delay to the host operation; I can imagine SMI sending
data to ME and then BMC retrieving it via IPMB but, again, I can't
find any good reference about ME facilities...)

On Wed, Sep 07, 2022 at 07:04:48AM -0700, Johnathan Mantey wrote:
> A back of envelope thought I had is perhaps the host side could interact with
> the BMC via a mailbox. The issue being you'd have to have SW running during the
> BIOS time, and when the OS was in control an OS helper app pushing the data. I'm
> not sure how feasible that idea is.

Some kind of agent running on host can certainly do that. But
apparently no popular GNU/Linux distros package anything like that, so
it must be a rare need.

I asked experienced VMWare ESXi admins and they told me even SATA
drives show in BMC properly without any additional vendor "vibs"
installed on the host system so there must be some side channel
present on many production server systems. 

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