OpenHPI 10,000 foot view
This chapter attempts to give an overview of the current OpenHPI implementation. It will always lag behind the actually source code base, so interested parties are best served by retrieving OpenHPI from our CVS repository, and joining the OpenHPI mailing lists.
Theory
Guiding Principles
The goal of OpenHPI is to become the reference implemention for HPI. HPI is an emerging specification, of great importance to those wishing to have a standardized mechanism for Platform Management. By producing a reliable Open Source implementation of HPI, the OpenHPI team will help to turn HPI from an emerging specification to an industry standard.
There are a few guiding principals behind the design and implementation of the OpenHPI project. To succeed, the project must be:
Simple - the easier the code is to follow, the easier it is to find and fix bugs.
Reliable - OpenHPI will be used in very dynamic environments, and will need to be as robust as possible. To this end, the reliance on well known, well debugged external libraries is perfered to writing our own implementations of the same functions.
Efficient - this is both in terms of performance as well as code re-use. For performance, the reasons are obvious; you don't want your management layers to bring down the performance of your system. In regard to code re-use--the more that pieces of code can be re-used the faster that others can develop hardware specific components to sit within the OpenHPI domain.