Sun
   Microsystems              Systems Architecture Committee
_________________________________________________________________

Subject:	Solaris ATCA IPMI Driver

Submitted by:	Kevin Song

File:		PSARC/2009/467/opinion.txt

Date:		November 20, 2009.

Committee:	Kais Belgaied, Garrett D'Amore, Sebastien Roy, Glenn Skinner,
		Mark Carlson, Ricahrd Matthews, Gary Winiger.
		
Product Approval Committee:
		Systems PAC
		solaris-pac-opinion@sun.com

1.  Summary

Opinion: OpenIPMI is reference architecture going forward

Opinion: Old drivers should update to use OpenIPMI

OpenIPMI should be used as a reference architecture going forward.


2.  Decision & Precedence Information

The project is approved as specified in reference [1].

The project may be delivered in a patch release of Solaris.


3.  Interfaces

Exported Interfaces
Interface Name        Classification       Comments
--------------------- -------------------- --------------------------

Imported Interfaces
Interface Name        Classification       Comments
--------------------- -------------------- --------------------------


4.  Opinion

During the discussion it quickly became clear that OpenIPMI should be
used as a reference architecture, and new and old IPMI drivers should
support the OpenIPMI API.

The following reasons were sited:

1) OpenIPMI is an active open source project and the dominant IPMI API.
All our ATCA customers and the open source community write IPMI applications
based on OpenIPMI. For example, OpenHPI is based on OpenIPMI.

2) Solaris IPMI dev interface needs to be compatible to OpenIPMI to support
customer's OpenIPMI based applications, to compete with Linux based
products.

3) When our devices use a compatible OpenIPMI interface our customer's
applications can be ported to Solaris as easy as recompiling.


5.  Minority Opinion(s)

None.

6.  Advisory Information

None.

7.  Appendices

7.1.  Appendix A: Technical Changes Required

None.

7.2.  Appendix B: Technical Changes Advised

None.

7.3.  Appendix C: Reference Material

PSARC/2009/467/final.materials/*


PSARC/2009/467               Copyright 2009 Sun Microsystems