Daily Archives: 10/12/2019

Blackbird (singing in the dead of night..)

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Way back when Raptor Computer Systems was doing pre-orders for the microATX Blackboard POWER9 system, I put in a pre-order. Since then, I’ve had a few life changes (such as moving to the US and starting to work for Amazon rather than IBM), but I’ve finally gone and done (most of) the setup for my own POWER9 system on (or under) my desk.

An 8 core POWER9 CPU, in bubble wrap and plastic packaging.

Everything came in a big brown box, all rather well packed. I had the board, CPU, heatsink assembly and the special tool to attach the heatsink to the board. Although unique to POWER9, the heatsink/fan assembly was one of the easier ones I’ve ever attached to a board.

The board itself looks pretty much as you’d expect – there’s a big spot for the CPU, a couple of PCI slots, a couple of DIMM slots and some SATA connectors.

The bits that are a bit unusual for a micro-ATX board are the big space reserved for FlexVer, the ASPEED BMC chip and the socketed flash. FlexVer is something I’m not ever going to use, and instead wish that there was an on-board m2 SSD slot instead, even if it was just PCIe. Having to sacrifice a PCIe slot just for a SSD is kind of a bummer.

The Blackbird POWER9 board
The POWER9 chip in socket
If you’re in the know, you know the pain these two chips and their firmware cause you. Luckily, the ASPEED2500 is running OpenBMC, so there is hope, plus there’s a “write open source firmware for it” effort for the Broadcom.

One annoying thing is my DIMMs are taking their sweet time in getting here, so I couldn’t actually populate the board with any memory.

Even without memory though, you can start powering it on and see that everything else works okay (i.e. it’s not completely boned). So, even without DIMMs, I could plug it in, and observe the Hostboot firmware complaining about insufficient hardware to IPL the box.

It Lives!

Yep, out the console (via ssh) you clearly see where things fail:

--== Welcome to Hostboot hostboot-3beba24/hbicore.bin ==--

  3.03104|secure|SecureROM valid - enabling functionality
  6.67619|Booting from SBE side 0 on master proc=00050000
  6.85100|ISTEP  6. 5 - host_init_fsi
  7.23753|ISTEP  6. 6 - host_set_ipl_parms
  7.71759|ISTEP  6. 7 - host_discover_targets
 11.34738|HWAS|PRESENT> Proc[05]=8000000000000000
 11.34739|HWAS|PRESENT> Core[07]=1511540000000000
 11.69077|ISTEP  6. 8 - host_update_master_tpm
 11.73787|SECURE|Security Access Bit> 0x0000000000000000
 11.73787|SECURE|Secure Mode Disable (via Jumper)> 0x8000000000000000
 11.76276|ISTEP  6. 9 - host_gard
 11.96654|HWAS|FUNCTIONAL> Proc[05]=8000000000000000
 11.96655|HWAS|FUNCTIONAL> Core[07]=1511540000000000
 12.07554|================================================
 12.07554|Error reported by hwas (0x0C00) PLID 0x90000007
 12.10289|  checkMinimumHardware found no functional dimm cards.
 12.10290|  ModuleId   0x03 MOD_CHECK_MIN_HW
 12.10291|  ReasonCode 0x0c06 RC_SYSAVAIL_NO_MEMORY_FUNC
 12.10292|  UserData1  HUID of node : 0x0002000000000000
 12.10293|  UserData2  number of present, non-functional dimms : 0x0000000000000000
 12.10294|------------------------------------------------
 12.10417|  Callout type             : Procedure Callout
 12.10417|  Procedure                : EPUB_PRC_FIND_DECONFIGURED_PART
 12.10418|  Priority                 : SRCI_PRIORITY_HIGH
 12.10419|------------------------------------------------
 12.10420|  Hostboot Build ID: hostboot-3beba24/hbicore.bin
 12.10421|================================================
 12.51718|================================================
 12.51719|Error reported by hwas (0x0C00) PLID 0x90000007
 12.51720|  Insufficient hardware to continue.
 12.51721|  ModuleId   0x03 MOD_CHECK_MIN_HW
 12.51722|  ReasonCode 0x0c04 RC_SYSAVAIL_INSUFFICIENT_HW
 12.54457|  UserData1   : 0x0000000000000000
 12.54458|  UserData2   : 0x0000000000000000
 12.54458|------------------------------------------------
 12.54459|  Callout type             : Procedure Callout
 12.54460|  Procedure                : EPUB_PRC_FIND_DECONFIGURED_PART
 12.54461|  Priority                 : SRCI_PRIORITY_HIGH
 12.54462|------------------------------------------------
 12.54462|  Hostboot Build ID: hostboot-3beba24/hbicore.bin
 12.54463|================================================
 12.73660|System shutting down with error status 0x90000007
 12.75545|================================================
 12.75546|Error reported by istep (0x1700) PLID 0x90000007
 12.77991|  IStep failed, see other log(s) with the same PLID for reason.
 12.77992|  ModuleId   0x01 MOD_REPORTING_ERROR
 12.77993|  ReasonCode 0x1703 RC_FAILURE
 12.77994|  UserData1  eid of first error : 0x9000000800000c04
 12.77995|  UserData2  Reason code of first error : 0x0000000100000609
 12.77996|------------------------------------------------
 12.77996|  host_gard
 12.77997|------------------------------------------------
 12.77998|  Callout type             : Procedure Callout
 12.77998|  Procedure                : EPUB_PRC_HB_CODE
 12.77999|  Priority                 : SRCI_PRIORITY_LOW
 12.78000|------------------------------------------------
 12.78001|  Hostboot Build ID: hostboot-3beba24/hbicore.bin
 12.78002|================================================

Looking forward to getting some DIMMs to show/share more.

Looking at the state of Blackbird firmware

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Having been somewhat involved in OpenPOWER firmware, I have a bunch of experience and opinions on maintaining firmware trees for products, what working with upstream looks like and all that.

So, with my new Blackbird system I decided to take a bit of a look as to what the firmware situation was like.

There’s two main parts of firmware: BMC and Host. The BMC firmware runs purely on the ASPEED AST2500 and is based on OpenBMC while the host firmware is what runs on the POWER9 and is based off of OpenPOWER Firmware as assembled by op-build.

Initial impressions on the BMC is that there doesn’t seem to be any web based UI for it, which is kind of disappointing, as the Web UI being developed upstream has some nice qualities, and I’d say I even enjoyed using it when it was built into BMC firmware for systems we had when I was at IBM.

Looking at the git trees, the raptor-v1.00 tag is OpenBMC 2.7.0-dev-533-g386e5602e while current master is 2.8.0-dev-960-g10f7830bd. The spot where it split off was 2.7.0-dev-430-g7443ee80b, from April 2019 – so it’s not too old, but I’m also not convinced there should have been some security patches since then.

I’m not sure if any of the OpenBMC code is upstream, I haven’t looked.

Unfortunately, none of the host firmware is upstream.

On the host firmware side, v2.3-rc2-67-ga6a5f142 is the Raptor tag, and that compares with current master of v2.4-305-g54d8daf4, the place where Raptor forked was v2.3-rc2-9-g7b556015, again in April of 2019. Considering there was an upstream release in May of 2019 (v2.3), and again in July (v2.4), it could have easily have made it into an upstream release.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to have been an upstream op-build release since v2.4 back in July (when I made it shortly before leaving IBM).

The skiboot component of host firmware has had an upstream release since I left (v6.5 in mid-August 2019), so the (rather trivial) platform support could have easily made it. I have a cleaned up and ready to upstream patch for it, I just need some DIMMs to actually test with before I send the patch.

As the current firmware situation stands, producing another build with updated upstream code is tricky due to the out-of-tree nature of the Blackbird patches, and a straight “git merge” is probably doable by some people, but not everybody.

On my TODO list is to get all the code into a state I can upstream it, assess vulnerability to CVE-2019-6260, and work out how I want to make it do Secure Boot (something that isn’t in upstream firmware yet, and currently would require a TPM, which I do not have).