Linux expertise for Open Compute support for eNovance

The context

eNovance (now part of the Red Hat Group) is one of the major players in the OpenStack project.

The need

eNovance wanted to base a test server architecture on open hardware provided by the Open Compute project in order to deploy an OpenStack infrastructure.

Requirement

Provide support and skills for hardware support by the Linux kernel in this project.

The solution

The servers were installed jointly with the eNovance team. A number of important topics, notably in the OpenStack deployment framework, were discussed:

• running dcmitool, an IPMItool-based command-line application, for systems supporting only the DCMI protocol,
• ipmitool patch for full support of in-band features of dcmitool,
  error correction due to the BIOS,
• fix the initrd for a kernel version, sent back to Debian,
• documentation for help with using system base features.