Power control

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There are two main approaches towards controlling power on a Serenity blade. Power to the two processing FPGA sites can be controlled by SMASH software running on the onboard ComExpress. However, the IPMC implements lower level functionality complying with ATCA specifications. The IPMC’s payload power control covers not only the two processing FPGA sites, but also the service FPGA and the ComExpress. A reboot of the latter two can thus be achieved by powercycling the board according to the instructions below.

The sections below describe how to enable/disable payload power to the board (e.g. in order to powercycle it) through two different methods:

  1. By first logging into the shelf manager, then using its command line interface

  2. Using ipmitool to remotely issue IPMI commands over the network

The commands below have been tested on a Pigeon Point 700 series shelf manager in a Schroff 14 slot ATCA shelf.

Method 1: Using the shelf manager command line

You will need to connect to the shelf manager either through its serial console, or with SSH via Ethernet.

# disable payload power of board in physical slot 3:
clia deactivate board 3

# enable payload power of board in physical slot 3:
clia activate board 3

Method 2: Using ipmitool over the network

This requires knowledge of the IPMB address of the blade. The mapping between physical slot address and IPMB address can be retrieved from the shelf manager command line interface using clia shelf at, or by clia board. It is in the range 0x82-0x9c.

# disable payload power for the board in question, e.g. 0x92, using a shelf manager at IP address 192.168.200.45:
ipmitool -I lan -H 192.168.200.45 -t 0x92 -b 0 -A NONE picmg policy set 0 2 0

# enable payload power
ipmitool -I lan -H 192.168.200.45 -t 0x92 -b 0 -A NONE picmg policy set 0 1 0

Note: -A NONE disables authentication for the request. If your shelf manager requires authentication, remove that option and provide username and password instead, using -U and -P

The ipmitool commands do not seem to be supported by all ATCA shelves. Please report any problems to Kristian.Harder@stfc.ac.uk .