Monthly Archives: December 2014

More OpenPower Firmware code released: OCC

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Inside the IBM POWER8 chip there’s another processor! That’s right folks, you get another CPU for no extra cost (It’s a lot funnier if you say these previous two sentences as if you were presenting an informercial for a special TV offer).

It is, however, not what you’d consider a general purpose processor. It is, in fact, a PowerPC 405 – so your POWER8 processor also has another PowerPC chip in it. What’s the purpose of this chip? It’s named the On Chip Controller and it has the job of helping make the main processor (the POWER8) work.

It has two jobs:

  • Monitor temperature and keep the system thermally safe
  • Monitor power usage and keep the system power safe

It runs a hard Real Time OS which has just been released up on github.com/open-power/occ

There’s more complete documentation on OCC here.

It’s fairly exciting to see more of the software that runs on every POWER8 system make it out into the world.

skiboot-4.1

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I just posted this to the mailing list, but I’ve tagged skiboot-4.1, so we have another release! There’s a good amount of changes since 4.0 nearly a month ago and this is the second release since we hit github back in July.

For the full set of changes, “git log” is your friend, but a summary of them follows:

  • We now build with -fstack-protector and -Werror
  • Stack checking extensions when built with STACK_CHECK=1
  • Reduced stack usage in some areas, -Wstack-usage=1024 now.
    • Some functions could use 2kb stack, now all are <1kb
  • Unsafe libc functions such as sprintf() have been removed
  • Symbolic backtraces
  • expose skiboot symbol map to OS (via device-tree)
  • removed machine check interrupt patching in OPAL
  • occ/hbrt: Call stopOCC() for implementing reset OCC command from FSP
  • occ: Fix the low level ACK message sent to FSP on receiving {RESET/LOAD}_OCC
  • hardening to errors of various FSP code
    • fsp: Avoid NULL dereference in case of invalid class_resp bits
    • abort if device tree parsing fails
    • FSP: Validate fsp_msg in fsp_queue_msg
    • fsp-elog: Add various NULL checks
  • Finessing of when to use error log vs prerror()
  • More i2c work
  • Can now run under Mambo simulator (see external/mambo/skiboot.tcl) (commonly known as “POWER8 Functional Simulator”)
  • Document skiboot versioning scheme
  • opal: Handle more TFAC errors.
    • TB_RESIDUE_ERR, FW_CONTROL_ERR and CHIP_TOD_PARITY_ERR
  • ipmi: populate FRU data
  • rtc: Add a generic rtc cache
  • ipmi/rtc: use generic cache
  • Error Logging backend for bmc based machines
  • PSI: Drive link down on HIR
  • occ: Fix clearing of OCC interrupt on remote fix

So, who worked on this release? We had 84 csets from 17 developers. A total of 3271 lines were added, 1314 removed (delta 1957).

Developers with the most changesets
Stewart Smith 24 28.6%
Benjamin Herrenschmidt 17 20.2%
Alistair Popple 8 9.5%
Vasant Hegde 6 7.1%
Ananth N Mavinakayanahalli 5 6.0%
Neelesh Gupta 4 4.8%
Mahesh Salgaonkar 4 4.8%
Cédric Le Goater 3 3.6%
Wei Yang 3 3.6%
Anshuman Khandual 2 2.4%
Shilpasri G Bhat 2 2.4%
Ryan Grimm 1 1.2%
Anton Blanchard 1 1.2%
Shreyas B. Prabhu 1 1.2%
Joel Stanley 1 1.2%
Vaidyanathan Srinivasan 1 1.2%
Dan Streetman 1 1.2%
Developers with the most changed lines
Benjamin Herrenschmidt 1290 35.1%
Alistair Popple 963 26.2%
Stewart Smith 344 9.4%
Mahesh Salgaonkar 308 8.4%
Ananth N Mavinakayanahalli 198 5.4%
Neelesh Gupta 186 5.1%
Vasant Hegde 122 3.3%
Shilpasri G Bhat 39 1.1%
Vaidyanathan Srinivasan 24 0.7%
Joel Stanley 21 0.6%
Wei Yang 20 0.5%
Anshuman Khandual 15 0.4%
Cédric Le Goater 12 0.3%
Shreyas B. Prabhu 9 0.2%
Ryan Grimm 3 0.1%
Anton Blanchard 2 0.1%
Dan Streetman 2 0.1%
Developers with the most lines removed
Mahesh Salgaonkar 287 21.8%
Developers with the most signoffs (total 54)
Stewart Smith 44 81.5%
Vasant Hegde 4 7.4%
Benjamin Herrenschmidt 4 7.4%
Vaidyanathan Srinivasan 2 3.7%
Developers with the most reviews (total 2)
Vasant Hegde 2 100.0%

Running skiboot (OPAL) on the POWER8 Simulator

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skiboot is open source boot and runtime firmware for OpenPOWER. On real POWER8 hardware, you will also need HostBoot to do this (basically, to make the chip work) but in a functional simulator (such as this one released by IBM) you don’t need a bunch of hardware procedures to make hardware work, so we can make do with just skiboot.

The POWER8 Functional Simulator is free to use but not open source and is only supported on limited platforms. But you can always run it all in a VM! I have it running this way on my laptop right now.

To go from a bare Ubuntu 14.10 VM on x86_64 to running skiboot in the simulator, I did the following:

  • apt-get install vim git emacs wget xterm # xterm is needed by the simulator. wget and editors are useful things.
  • (download systemsim-p8…deb from above URL)
  • dpkg -i systemsim-p8*deb # now the simulator is installed
  • git clone https://github.com/open-power/skiboot.git # get skiboot source
  • wget https://www.kernel.org/pub/tools/crosstool/files/bin/x86_64/4.8.0/x86_64-gcc-4.8.0-nolibc_powerpc64-linux.tar.xz # get a compiler to build it with
  • apt-get install make gcc valgrind # get build tools (skiboot unittests run on the host, so get a gcc and valgrind)
  • tar xfJ x86_64-gcc-4.8.0-nolibc_powerpc64-linux.tar.xz
  • mkdir -p /opt/cross
  • mv gcc-4.8.0-nolibc /opt/cross/ # now you have a powerpc64 cross compiler
  • export PATH=/opt/cross/gcc-4.8.0-nolibc/powerpc64-linux/bin/:$PATH # add cross compiler to path
  • cd skiboot
  • make # this should build a bunch of things, leaving you with skiboot.lid (and other things). If you have many CPUs, feel free to make -j128.
  • make check # run the unit tests. Everything should pass.
  • cd external/mambo
  • /opt/ibm/systemsim-p8/run/pegasus/power8 -f skiboot.tcl # run the simulator

The last step there will barf as you unlikely have a /tmp/zImage.epapr sitting around that’s suitable. If you use op-build to build a full set of OpenPower foo, you’ll likely be able to extract it from there. Basically, the skiboot.tcl script is adding a payload for skiboot to execute. On real hardware, this ends up being a Linux kernel with a small userspace and petitboot (link is to IBM documentation for IBM POWER8 systems). For the simulator, you could boot any tiny zImage.epapr you like, it should detect OPALv3 and boot!

Even if you cannot be bothered building a kernel or petitboot environment, if you comment out the associated lines in skiboot.tcl, you should be able to run the simulator and see the skiboot console message come up that says we couldn’t load a kernel.

At this point, congratulations, you can now become an OpenPower firmware hacker without even possessing any POWER8 hardware!

skiboot/OPAL versioning

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skiboot is boot and runtime firmware for OpenPower systems. There are other components that make up all the firmware you need, but if you’re, say, a Linux kernel, you’re going to be interacting with skiboot.

I recently committed doc/versioning.txt to skiboot to try and explain our current thoughts on versioning releases.

It turns out that picking version numbers is a bit harder than you’d expect, especially when you want to construct a version string to display in places that has semantic meaning. In fact, the writing on Semantic Versioning influenced us heavily.

Since we’re firmware, making incompatible API changes is something we should basically never, ever do. Old kernels should must boot and work on new firmware and new kernels should boot and function on old firmware (and if they don’t, it plainly be a kernel bug). So, ignore the Major version parts of Semantic Versioning for us :)

For each new release, we plan to bump the minor version for mostly bug fix releases, while bump the major version for added functionality. Any additional information is to describe the version on that particular platform – as everybody shipping OPAL is likely to build it themselves with possibly some customizations (e.g. YOUR COMPANY NAME HERE, support for some on board RAID card or on-board automated coffee maker). See doc/versioning.txt for details.

You may wonder why we started at 4.0 for our first real version number. Well… this is purely a cunning plan to avoid confusion with other things, the details of which will only be extracted out of my when plied with a suitable amount of excellent craft beer (because if I’m going to tell a boring story, I may as well have awesome craft beer).