bios

Puppet-Bios

A puppet module for configuring bios settings.

Requirements / Supported Platforms

Not all hardware platforms can have their bios changed in a programmatic way. The sad truth is that most platforms require a warm body to change bios settings. You are in luck though if you have something like:

• Intel based platforms (using the syscfg tool)
• Dell C-series Servers (using the setupbios tool)
• More platforms with your help! Pull request me!

Important: This module assumes you have the proper tool installed and in the path. This is left as an exercise to the reader. I suggest finding the tool appropriate for your platform, pick a place to put it, write a wrapper script for /usr/bin and use fpm to package it all together.

Configuration

As long as you have the tool installed in the default path, there shouldn't need to be any configuration. It sets up a defined type that you can use over and over for each bios setting you need.

Examples

 # Easy to set on a dell
 bios::setting { 'turbo_mode': value => 'disabled' }
 
 # Intel requires some more hand holding with turbo. You set 1/0 and expect Enabled/Disabled..
 bios::setting { 'Intel(R) Turbo Boost Technology':
   value   => '0',
   expect  => 'Disabled',
   section => 'Processor Configuration'
 }
 
 # Set fan speed on intel:
 bios::setting { 'Fan PWM Offset':
   value   => '100',
   section => 'System Acoustic and Performance Configuration'
 }
 
 # Disabled Cstates on dell:
 bios::setting { 'c_states': value => 'disabled' }

What?

Where did I get these magic words? How do I know what section to use? How do I know what valid inputs are for "value" and when to "expect" something different?

I don't have a good answer. You can look in the docs folder for some example outputs of these commands. At first I attempted to have puppet validate inputs to abstract over some of this, but there are just so many possible combinations of platform/bios revision/hardware/etc. It is much more sane to let the tool itself validate your inputs. (the tool is the single point of truth)

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

Contact

Kyle Anderson kyle@xkyle.com