Drivers, Hardware Types and Hardware Interfaces¶
Generic Interfaces¶
Hardware Types¶
Changing Hardware Types and Interfaces¶
Hardware types and interfaces are enabled in the configuration as described in Enabling drivers and hardware types. Usually, a hardware type is configured on enrolling as described in Enrollment:
baremetal node create --driver <hardware type>
Any hardware interfaces can be specified on enrollment as well:
baremetal node create --driver <hardware type> \
--deploy-interface direct --<other>-interface <other implementation>
For the remaining interfaces the default value is assigned as described in Defaults for hardware interfaces. Both the hardware type and the hardware interfaces can be changed later via the node update API.
Changing Hardware Interfaces¶
Hardware interfaces can be changed by the following command:
baremetal node set <NODE> \
--deploy-interface direct \
--<other>-interface <other implementation>
The modified interfaces must be enabled and compatible with the current node’s hardware type.
Changing Hardware Type¶
Changing the node’s hardware type can pose a problem. When the driver
field is updated, the final result must be consistent, that is, the resulting
hardware interfaces must be compatible with the new hardware type. This will
not work:
baremetal node create --name test --driver fake-hardware
baremetal node set test --driver ipmi
This is because the fake-hardware
hardware type defaults to fake
implementations for some or all interfaces, but the ipmi
hardware type is
not compatible with them. There are three ways to deal with this situation:
Provide new values for all incompatible interfaces, for example:
baremetal node set test --driver ipmi \ --boot-interface pxe \ --deploy-interface iscsi \ --management-interface ipmitool \ --power-interface ipmitool
Request resetting some of the interfaces to their new defaults by using the
--reset-<IFACE>-interface
family of arguments, for example:baremetal node set test --driver ipmi \ --reset-boot-interface \ --reset-deploy-interface \ --reset-management-interface \ --reset-power-interface
Note
This feature is available starting with ironic 11.1.0 (Rocky series, API version 1.45).
Request resetting all interfaces to their new defaults:
baremetal node set test --driver ipmi --reset-interfaces
You can still specify explicit values for some interfaces:
baremetal node set test --driver ipmi --reset-interfaces \ --deploy-interface direct
Note
This feature is available starting with ironic 11.1.0 (Rocky series, API version 1.45).
Static boot order configuration¶
Some hardware is known to misbehave when changing the boot device through the
BMC. To work around it you can use the noop
management interface
implementation with the ipmi
and redfish
hardware types. In this case
the Bare Metal service will not change the boot device for you, leaving
the pre-configured boot order.
For example, in case of the PXE boot:
Via any available means configure the boot order on the node as follows:
Boot from PXE/iPXE on the provisioning NIC.
Warning
If it is not possible to limit network boot to only provisioning NIC, make sure that no other DHCP/PXE servers are accessible by the node.
Boot from hard drive.
Make sure the
noop
management interface is enabled, for example:[DEFAULT] enabled_hardware_types = ipmi,redfish enabled_management_interfaces = ipmitool,redfish,noop
Change the node to use the
noop
management interface:baremetal node set <NODE> --management-interface noop
Unsupported drivers¶
The following drivers were declared as unsupported in ironic Newton release and as of Ocata release they are removed from ironic:
AMT driver - available as part of ironic-staging-drivers
iBoot driver - available as part of ironic-staging-drivers
Wake-On-Lan driver - available as part of ironic-staging-drivers
Virtualbox drivers
SeaMicro drivers
MSFT OCS drivers
The SSH drivers were removed in the Pike release. Similar functionality can be achieved either with VirtualBMC or using libvirt drivers from ironic-staging-drivers.