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hprcu

Manage HP server BIOS settings

10,745 downloads

10,429 latest version

3.5 quality score

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Version information

  • 0.0.2 (latest)
  • 0.0.1
released Dec 12th 2013

Start using this module

  • r10k or Code Manager
  • Bolt
  • Manual installation
  • Direct download

Add this module to your Puppetfile:

mod 'tobyriddell-hprcu', '0.0.2'
Learn more about managing modules with a Puppetfile

Add this module to your Bolt project:

bolt module add tobyriddell-hprcu
Learn more about using this module with an existing project

Manually install this module globally with Puppet module tool:

puppet module install tobyriddell-hprcu --version 0.0.2

Direct download is not typically how you would use a Puppet module to manage your infrastructure, but you may want to download the module in order to inspect the code.

Download
Tags: hardware, bios, hp, hprcu

Documentation

tobyriddell/hprcu — version 0.0.2 Dec 12th 2013

puppet-hprcu

Puppet type & provider to modify BIOS of HP servers using hprcu

Usage

puppet resource hprcu

puppet apply -e "hprcu{ 'default': intelrhyperthreadingoptions = 'Enabled' }"

In a manifest:

In a class:

Notes:

  • There's only one collection of BIOS settings per host so there's only one hprcu resource per host, and its name is 'default'.
  • Property names must conform to the Puppet grammar, as defined in grammar.ra in the Puppet source. Thus 'Intel (R) Hyperthreading Options' is represented by 'intelrhyperthreadingoptions'.
  • You may want to run this code (and therefore hprcu) only when required - running hprcu may interfere with reading the realtime clock from the CMOS (see footnote 4 here: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25686.html)

Regenerating lib/puppet/type/hprcu.rb

It may be necessary to regenerate the Ruby code for the provider if new BIOS settings are added or names change. Here's an example of how to do this:

Dependencies

This code requires Gregoire Lejeune's ruby-xslt: https://github.com/glejeune/ruby-xslt

Design choices

It would be ideal to have a single type for managing BIOS settings for multiple vendors' hardware, and a provider per-vendor to manage resource properties for each particular vendor platform. However, the target is slowly moving: vendors have different names for the same BIOS setting, BIOS revisions can change property names ('name-creep'), new hardware may introduce new settings. Owing to the fact that Puppet doesn't support dynamic property names (see http://grokbase.com/t/gg/puppet-dev/1254htyrr9/how-to-allow-user-specified-property-names-in-provider-code) the names of properties must be pre-defined.

One option would be to map between a setting (e.g. C-states) and a well-defined name, but there are drawbacks to this approach:

  • what to do it a setting is only supported by HP and not Oracle (for example)
  • if a setting's name changes the mappings would need updating

These considerations have led me to implement a type & provider for HP hardware. The hprcu utility is used under the hood to query and change settings. In order to make life easier in the face of name-creep, the code for the type can be regenerated automatically using XML output from hprcu (the provider doesn't contain any hard-coded property names and therefore shouldn't need to be changed so often). This auto-generation may also be needed to support different BIOS revisions that have different names for settings.

Because property names are auto-generated they can be non-intuitive, for example 'intelrhyperthreadingoptions' instead of plain 'hyperthreading'. As mentioned above, I don't want to have to maintain a static mapping and hence have chosen not to use more friendly names. Running 'puppet resource hprcu' on a server is a good way to determine the name of the relevant property.