ThunderX BMC initialization failure

[dann frazier]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 2:55 AM, Itaru Kitayama <itaru.kitayama at riken.jp> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We're seeing below on our ThunderX
>
> $ sudo systemctl start ipmi
> Job for ipmi.service failed because the control process exited with error
> code. See "systemctl status ipmi.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.
> $ sudo journalctl -xe
> ...
> -- Unit ipmi.service has begun starting up.
> Sep 12 15:54:52 satsuma kernel: ipmi message handler version 39.2
> Sep 12 15:54:53 satsuma kernel: IPMI System Interface driver.
> Sep 12 15:54:53 satsuma kernel: ipmi_si: probing via SMBIOS
> Sep 12 15:54:53 satsuma kernel: ipmi_si: Unable to find any System
> Interface(s)
> Sep 12 15:54:53 satsuma openipmi-helper[2800]: Startup failed.
> Sep 12 15:54:53 satsuma systemd[1]: ipmi.service: main process exited,
> code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
> Sep 12 15:54:53 satsuma systemd[1]: Failed to start IPMI Driver.
> -- Subject: Unit ipmi.service has failed
> ...
>
> Is it caused by the IPMI driver that comes with CentOS 7 or the BIOS?

Itaru,

There could be multiple things going on here. For one, I don't believe
openipmi's upstream initscript knows about the ipmi_ssif driver yet.
This issue may also impact CentOS (and probably needs fixing in
upstream openipmi):
  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=875537

And your kernel needs to be new enough and have the right drivers
enabled to support it.
v4.12 should be new enough. Tests for that are described here:
 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1688132

Finally, your BIOS does need to have SMBIOS tables that describe the
interface. Make sure this returns something:
$ sudo dmidecode | grep IPMI

  -dann