Re: [PATCH v4] drivers/misc: Add Aspeed LPC control driver

Greg KH
2017-02-10T14:31:15Z

On Wed, Feb 08, 2017 at 10:42:47AM +1100, Cyril Bur wrote:
> In order to manage server systems, there is typically another processor
> known as a BMC (Baseboard Management Controller) which is responsible
> for powering the server and other various elements, sometimes fans,
> often the system flash.
>
> The Aspeed BMC family which is what is used on OpenPOWER machines and a
> number of x86 as well is typically connected to the host via an LPC
> (Low Pin Count) bus (among others).
>
> The LPC bus is an ISA bus on steroids. It's generally used by the
> BMC chip to provide the host with access to the system flash (via MEM/FW
> cycles) that contains the BIOS or other host firmware along with a
> number of SuperIO-style IOs (via IO space) such as UARTs, IPMI
> controllers.
>
> On the BMC chip side, this is all configured via a bunch of registers
> whose content is related to a given policy of what devices are exposed
> at a per system level, which is system/vendor specific, so we don't want
> to bolt that into the BMC kernel. This started with a need to provide
> something nicer than /dev/mem for user space to configure these things.
>
> One important aspect of the configuration is how the MEM/FW space is
> exposed to the host (ie, the x86 or POWER). Some registers in that
> bridge can define a window remapping all or portion of the LPC MEM/FW
> space to a portion of the BMC internal bus, with no specific limits
> imposed in HW.
>
> I think it makes sense to ensure that this window is configured by a
> kernel driver that can apply some serious sanity checks on what it is
> configured to map.
>
> In practice, user space wants to control this by flipping the mapping
> between essentially two types of portions of the BMC address space:
>
> - The flash space. This is a region of the BMC MMIO space that
> more/less directly maps the system flash (at least for reads, writes
> are somewhat more complicated).
>
> - One (or more) reserved area(s) of the BMC physical memory.
>
> The latter is needed for a number of things, such as avoiding letting
> the host manipulate the innards of the BMC flash controller via some
> evil backdoor, we want to do flash updates by routing the window to a
> portion of memory (under control of a mailbox protocol via some
> separate set of registers) which the host can use to write new data in
> bulk and then request the BMC to flash it. There are other uses, such
> as allowing the host to boot from an in-memory flash image rather than
> the one in flash (very handy for continuous integration and test, the
> BMC can just download new images).
>
> It is important to note that due to the way the Aspeed chip lets the
> kernel configure the mapping between host LPC addresses and BMC ram
> addresses the offset within the window must be a multiple of size.
> Not doing so will fragment the accessible space rather than simply
> moving 'zero' upwards. This is caused by the nature of HICR8 being a
> mask and the way host LPC addresses are translated.
>
> Signed-off-by: Cyril Bur <cyrilbur@gmail.com>
> ---

Without some other reviewed-by: or at least tested-by lines here, I'm
not going to take this. Go poke your fellow ppc people to do some work
here, it shouldn't be up to me to do it for them :(

thanks,

greg k-h