Migrating to lshw for inventory task¶

Implementation of the inventory task¶

Currently, Beaker’s inventory task performs both the functions of retrieving the hardware data and sending it to the Beaker server. This makes the retrieval part of the process tightly coupled to the inventory task (running as part of a Beaker job). However, it is not necessary that inventory will always be performed on a system as part of a job and should not be so.

A new utility beaker-system-scan has been created which is capable of retrieving and sending the retrieved hardware data to a Beaker server. This utility was created by “extracting out” the relevant programs from the current inventory task. Beaker’s inventory task’s functionality is thus reduced to invoking beaker-system-scan.

The use of smolt in beaker-system-scan will be replaced by lshw.

Enhancing lshw and upstream contributions¶

It has been found that lshw retrieves incomplete information on architectures such as IBM s390x and ARM. For example, it lacks any support for retrieving the CPU information on IBM s390x. Thus, existing features of lshw will need enhancement to work correctly on such architectures. On the other hand, lshw doesn’t retrieve information such as audio codecs, which is an example of a feature that we need to add to lshw to suit Beaker’s needs.

Enhancements to lshw will first be incorporated into Beaker project’s fork of lshw and then submitted to the upstream lshw issue tracker.

The major enhancements merged to the fork so far are:

• A LD_PRELOAD-based testing framework, using sample data from real hardware. The tests are currently maintained in a separate git tree.
• Better support for retrieving CPU information on ARM and s390x systems.

Maintaining a fork of lshw is motivated by two factors:

• Allow beaker-system-scan to be updated independently of the upstream lshw release cycle
• Allow sufficient testing of the changes and then submit requests for integration into upstream

Comparing the data obtained from smolt and lshw¶

Once lshw’s features have been expanded and extended to suit Beaker’s needs, a thorough comparison of the data retrieved from smolt and lshw is required to see if lshw is able to get all the data that smolt would give us. If not, either lshw should be enhanced to retrieve those data or if the data is not important to Beaker’s users, document it as such.

To assist with comparing the output from both versions of beaker-system-scan, the Beaker team has developed a new Beaker task, /distribution/inventory-compare, which shows the two outputs side by side and highlights any differences found.

Related tasks¶

beaker-system-scan currently uses hal-find-by-property and hal-get-property to retrieve storage controller details and libparted to retrieve details of disk drives. In both the cases, lshw will be used instead (See #896302 and #902567 for details).