Re: [PATCH] Intel Management Engine Interface

[Anas Nashif]

Andi Kleen wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 01:38:10PM -0500, Anas Nashif wrote:
>> There are different ways you can connect to the Firmware and it all depends on
>> the ME subsystem you want to communicate with.
>> For Intel AMT, you would use LMS (Local Manageability Service) which acts as a
>> proxy for SOAP messages coming for management applications. LMS is available via
>> http://openamt.org/wiki/LocalManageabilityService.
>>
>> The demo we had for storing kernel oops messages in the firmware used the AMT
>> 1.0 interface (legacy) which allowed direct access to 3PDS using the MEI driver
>> interfaces. In AMT 3.0 (current platforms) this has been disabled and only SOAP
>> is possible which is why in the demo we changed the ME firmware to use AMT 1.0.
> 
> Ok but saving oops is such a useful facility that we'll probably need 
> to think about implementing SOAP in the kernel. Before everybody complains
> that I went crazy: I suspect with some simplifying assumptions it could
> be made relatively straight forward code. In particular if one assumes
> no packets get lost then it would be possible to strip down TCP greatly
> (so it doesn't need to be much more complicated than netconsole) 
> and I suspect a very minimal SOAP parser just for this application would
> be also possible.

Actually no TCP/IP is needed here. Basically the MEI driver writes and reads the
messages to/from the firmware. When communicating in-band using LMS, TCP/IP
terminates at LMS and the messages are copied using MEI driver.

> 
>> To have a feel for all of this, with many examples, samples and documentation
>> you can download the AMT 3.0 SDK (google: intel amt sdk).
> 
> I would be more interested right now how the kernel can use this without
> additional user space support. Any ideas on this? 

I will dig for some documents on that.

Anas

> 
> -Andi
> 
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