Re: [patch] IPMI driver for Linux

Corey Minyard
2002-08-21T16:48:44Z

Alan Cox wrote:

>On Wed, 2002-08-21 at 16:47, Corey Minyard wrote:
>
>
>>I have been working on an IPMI driver for Linux for MontaVista, and I
>>think it's ready to see the light of day :-). I would like to see this
>>included in the mainstream kernel eventually. You can get it at
>>http://home.attbi.com/~minyard. It should work on any kernel version,
>>although you will have to fix up the Config.in and Makefile, and the
>>Configure.help stuff may not work (it's currently in the 2.4 location).
>>
>>The web page has documentation on the driver, and documentation is
>>included in the patch, too. This is a fairly full-featured driver with
>>a watchdog, panic event generation, full kernel and userland access to
>>the driver, multi-user/multi-interface support, and emulators for other
>>IPMI device drivers.
>>
>>
>
>Comments in general.
>
>It touches user space with spinlocks held -> bad idea
>
Oops, thanks. I've uploaded a version that fixes this. I only found
one instance of this, but it's pretty bad.

>It doesnt check copy_*_user returns instead commenting that some other
>driver didnt so it wont - bad idea too
>
This was only in the emulation code. I debated about this, but it's
quite possible that doing the check will break the current users of this
code. I'm afraid if I add the checks it will cause other broken code to
not work. I could pull out the emulation code and supply it separately;
I would probably choose to not put that part into the mainstream kernel,
anyway.

>It seems to be allocating a major - can you have > 1 ipmi per host, can
>it use misc devices, can it get one registered properly with lanana
>
Yes, you can have multiple IPMI interfaces on a host (I have a board
that has 3!). There are serial-port interfaces planned that could also
easily have multiple instances as well as an on-board KCS. If there's
an easy way to do this with a minor device, I'm all ears, but I'd prefer
to have a separate device for each interface. This is one of the things
I wanted discussion about. Once that gets settled, I'll go to lanana.
Right now it's just being auto-assigned.

>Otherwise its way way way nicer than the hideous thing a certain chip
>vendor sent me.
>
>
I know what you mean.

Thank you for your response and suggestions.

-Corey
minyard@acm.org