Re: [PATCH 1/1 v2 ] ipmi: Setting OS name as Linux in BMC
From: Corey Minyard
Date: Fri Jun 29 2012 - 10:27:13 EST
On 06/29/2012 07:30 AM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 05:01:54PM -0700, Andi Kleen wrote:
Not sure that's all that useful. I can just see BMC's making the ACPI
mistake of trying to work around specific issues, by checking for
Linux.
I'm not sure I see that happening, but I suppose you never know.
But since there are so many different Linux that will never work
because "Linux" does not describe a fixed release or code base.
Probably dangerous.
Agreed. Linux doesn't make interface guarantees to hardware, and where
we've implied that we do it's ended up breaking things.
This is not really about making interface guarantees to hardware. This
is more of a management discovery thing, so that system management
software talking to the BMC can know what is running on the target.
Something where management software can say "Hey, why is Linux running
on that box? It's supposed to be BSD." or "That box has booted Linux but
hasn't started its maintenance software". According to the spec, the
information is supposed to be cleared if the system powers down or resets.
It seems to me that it's better to directly query what is running on the
target to know what is running on it, but perhaps that's a security
problem waiting to happen. And perhaps it's better to have a small
program set this at startup, since this operation will currently fail on
the majority of systems out there.
-corey
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