Overview of SA HPI - 10,000 foot view
The following chapter is designed as a primer on the SA HPI specification. It is meant to represent the OpenHPI teams interpretation and explaination of various portions of the spec as we see it, and to help new users and developers come up to speed quickly in understanding the specification. This chapter does not claim to be a comprehensive interpretation of the specification. For that, one would need far more than the 113 pages (how many pages is this now? - SeanDague) which comprise HPI B.01.01. When in doubt, refer directly to the HPI B.01.01 specification.
This chapter should always be considered a work in progress, and any questions or comments on it should be sent to the openhpi-devel@lists.sf.net mailing list.
Resource Model
Resources
HPI provides a platform management interface which is entirely based on resources. The crux of the entire HPI model is the Resource Presence Table (RPT). Everything which can exist physically is represented in the RPT. Every domain (we'll address domains later) contains one, and only one RPT.
The RPT is a concept in HPI, though it isn't actually a data structure. It is expected that implementers will create the proper data structure to encapsulate it. What is specified is 2 types of information:
- SaHpiRptInfoT - a meta data structure that contains the update time and incremental counter for the RPT.
/\ change this to Domain
- SaHpiRptEntryT - The actually Resource Presence Table entries. It is expected that there will be many of them.
From here on in the term Resource will be synonymous with an object of SaHpiRptEntryT type.