[Ipmitool-devel] [PATCH] ipmievd: Check percentage used and SEL buffer overflow

[Olivier F. <ofo...@re...>]

Hi,

Please let me know if this is not the proper format and/or mailing list, 
or if I should use the tracker instead.

Thanks in advance,
Olivier.
--
Hi,

If the SEL buffer become full, IPMI will stop logging new events. There 
is a mechanism in the IPMI specification to help monitoring the status 
of the SEL buffer and a flag that indicates when the buffer is full so 
that events had to be dropped. This is part of the data returned by "Get 
SEL Info Command" as defined in the IPMI 2.0 specification (section 
31.2, page 386).

The attached patch improves "ipmievd" to monitor the percentage used in
the SEL buffer and log warnings when the percentage is above a 80% and 
every time the percentage used increases above 80% and also log another 
alert syslog message when "overflow" occurs.

1) If the percentage used is above 80% a LOG_WARNING is emitted:
"SEL buffer used at nn%, please consider clearing the SEL buffer"

2) A new LOG_WARNING is emitted for any increase of percentage used
above 80% (eg. a new messages will be logged for 81%, 82%, ... 99%)

3) If the percentage decreases, no warning is emitted

4) If the "overflow" flag is set, a LOG_ALERT is emitted
"SEL buffer overflow, no SEL message can be logged until the SEL buffer 
  is cleared"

Then it would be the sysadmin's responsibility to clear the SEL buffer 
(possibly after saving the log of events to a file), but at least 
"ipmievd" provides a mechanism to help diagnosing before the SEL buffer 
becomes full.

Cheers,
Olivier