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This edition of the documentation was last updated on November, 13 2006 for release 0.3.0 of the GNU FreeIPMI.
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The IPMI specifications define standardized, abstracted interfaces to the platform management subsystem. IPMI includes the definition of interfaces for extending platform management between board within the main chassis, and between multiple chassis.
The term platform management is used to refer to the monitoring and control functions that are built in to the platform hardware and primarily used for the purpose of monitoring the health of the system hardware. This typically includes monitoring elements such as system temperatures, voltages, fans, power supplies, bus errors, system physical security, etc. It includes automatic and manually driven recovery capabilities such as local or remote system resets and power on/off operations. It includes the logging of abnormal or out-of-range conditions for later examination and alerting where the platform issues the alert without aid of run-time software. Lastly it includes inventory information that can help identify a failed hardware unit.
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GNU FreeIPMI is a Free Intelligent Platform Management System Software. It provides "Remote-Console" (out-of-band), "System Management Software" (in-band) and a development library confirming to Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI v1.5 and v2.0) standards.
GNU FreeIPMI User's Guide concentrates installation, usage, troubleshooting and bug reporting. It corresponds to 0.3.0 release.
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In September 2003, Albert Chu at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) began work on ipmipower, a tool for scalable remote power control. The project also included an IPMI library for packet construction. The tool was to be used for remote power control on Thunder, a 1024 node Itanium2 cluster for LLNL.
In October 2003, California Digital Corp. was contracted by LLNL for the assembly of Thunder and the development of several tools for IPMI management on Thunder. It was at this time that FreeIPMI's major development efforts began. The Thunder project allowed developers from both California Digital and LLNL to collaborate on various aspects of FreeIPMI, including various IPMI tools and the libfreeipmi library.
Anand Babu, Balamurugan and Ian Zimmerman at California Digital Corp. worked on the an in-band driver, libfreeipmi, ipmi-sensors, bmc-config, ipmi-sel, and bmc-info. Jim Garlick and Albert Chu at LLNL worked on ipmipower, bmc-watchdog, ipmiping, rmcpping, portions of the libfreeipmi library, and ipmipower support in Powerman. In May 2004, the LLNL developed software was officially merged into the GNU FreeIPMI project. In October 2004, FreeIPMI 0.1.0 was officially released. Around same time, FreeIPMI project was accepted by the Free Software Foundation as a GNU project.
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Maintenance and development of GNU FreeIPMI is shared between Z RESEARCH Inc. and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
(Z RESEARCH Inc. was founded by former members for California Digital Corp.)
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Some examples of the differences in approaches:
1) In-Band Driver
GNU FreeIPMI implements their in-band IPMI driver in userspace using iopl() calls (and /dev/io interface under FreeBSD) while OpenIPMI implements a kernel module for its in-band IPMI driver.
2) Libraries
OpenIPMI (to our knowledge) concentrates on higher level APIs to use the IPMI driver. GNU FreeIPMI primarily concentrates on APIs for IPMI packet construction. Some higher level management are provided although they are not considered the primary focus of libfreeipmi.
The GNU FreeIPMI developers have contributed patches to the other projects on multiple occassions.
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In our eyes, there are several reasons why GNU FreeIPMI is particularly special.
1) Support for HPC
Ipmipower is capable of scaling to very large numbers of nodes. At LLNL, in conjunction with Powerman, ipmipower is used for power control on clusters ranging from sizes of 8 to 1152. It is capable of power controlling several of the largest clusters in under a second.
Libipmiconsole is capable of setting up and maintaining SOL connections to a large number of nodes simultaneously.
The bmc-config configuration file and command-line interface are used to easily copy the BMC configuration from one node to every other node in a cluster quickly.
HPC support for other components in FreeIPMI is scheduled.
2) Easy setup
By implementing drivers in userspace libraries, there is no need to build/setup/manage any kernel modules/drivers.
3) Portability
Likewise, by implementing everything in userspace libraries and tools, portability to multiple operating systems and architectures is easier.
4) Additional features
By "splitting" various IPMI features into multiple tools, each tool is capable of providing the user with more options and features.
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GNU FreeIPMI's SSIF driver works on top of kernel'2 i2c device interface.
Under GNU/Linux load these kernel modules: i2c-dev, i2c-i801, i2c-core before using GNU FreeIPMI.
To identify SSIF device address:
Example:
$> lspci (in the output look for this entry)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp. 6300ESB SMBus Controller (rev 01)
Subsystem: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 342f
Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 17
I/O ports at 0400 [size=32]
----
$> cat /proc/bus/i2c
i2c-0 smbus SMBus I801 adapter at 0400 Non-I2C SMBus adapter
----
Make sure the "0400" above matches with the "0400" address under
proc. Also make sure "i2c-0" is not different. If it appears
different then grep for "i2c-0" in this code "ipmitool.c" and
change. "i2c-X" is the label assigned to each slave device attached on
the i2c bus.
BMC address Locator:
Refer to the SM BIOS IPMI Device Information Record
Type 38, record 06h and 08h. Use the value of record
06h as the IPMBAddress and load the SMBus controller
driver at the address value read from record 08h.
Usual values for record 06h -> 0x42
Usual values for record 08h -> 0x400
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Under some x86-64 platforms such as SUSE GNU/Linux, native 64 bit libraries reside under lib64 and 32 bit libs under lib. Autotools by default installs libfreeipmi.so under /usr/lib, instead of /usr/lib64 causing dynamic linking errors. Pass libdir appropriately to configure script to workaround this problem. (i.e. --libdir=/usr/lib64)
Example:
# ./configure --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64 |
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