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I agree with Devananda's definition of Œhardware discovery¹ and other
tools similar to Ironic use the term discovery in this way, however I have
found that these other tools often bundle the gathering of the system
properties together with the discovery of the hardware as a single step
from a user perspective. I also agree that in Ironic there needs to be a
separate term for that (at least from a dev perspective) and I think
Lucas¹s suggestion of Œhardware interrogation¹ or something like Œhardware
inventory¹ would be more explanatory at first glance than Œintrospection¹.

- Sam



On 21/10/2014 09:52, "Lucas Alvares Gomes" <lucasagomes at gmail.com> wrote:

>+1 for the separation
>
>I already gave up of the term "discovery" as you can see on the DRAC
>Hardware Introspection[1] spec, I also don't think that
>"introspection" is the best word for that (we already use the world
>"cloud" for OpenStack so it can't get more confusing than that).
>Perhaps "interrogation" would be another term for that.
>
>[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/125920
>
>Cheers,
>Lucas
>
>On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 8:49 AM, Dmitry Tantsur <dtantsur at redhat.com>
>wrote:
>> On 10/21/2014 02:11 AM, Devananda van der Veen wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I was reminded in the Ironic meeting today that the words "hardware
>>> discovery" are overloaded and used in different ways by different
>>> people. Since this is something we are going to talk about at the
>>> summit (again), I'd like to start the discussion by building consensus
>>> in the language that we're going to use.
>>>
>>> So, I'm starting this thread to explain how I use those two words, and
>>> some other words that I use to mean something else which is what some
>>> people mean when they use those words. I'm not saying my words are the
>>> right words -- they're just the words that make sense to my brain
>>> right now. If someone else has better words, and those words also make
>>> sense (or make more sense) then I'm happy to use those instead.
>>>
>>> So, here are rough definitions for the terms I've been using for the
>>> last six months to disambiguate this:
>>>
>>> "hardware discovery"
>>> The process or act of identifying hitherto unknown hardware, which is
>>> addressable by the management system, in order to later make it
>>> available for provisioning and management.
>>>
>>> "hardware introspection"
>>> The process or act of gathering information about the properties or
>>> capabilities of hardware already known by the management system.
>>
>> I generally agree with this separation, though it brings some troubles
>>to
>> me, as I'm used to calling "discovery" what you called "introspection"
>>(it
>> was not the case this summer, but now I changed my mind). And the term
>> "discovery" is baked into the.. hmm.. introspection service that I've
>> written [1].
>>
>> So I would personally prefer to leave "discovery" as in "discovery of
>> hardware properties", though I realize that "introspection" may be a
>>better
>> name.
>>
>> [1] https://github.com/Divius/ironic-discoverd
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Why is this disambiguation important? At the last midcycle, we agreed
>>> that "hardware discovery" is out of scope for Ironic -- finding new,
>>> unmanaged nodes and enrolling them with Ironic is best left to other
>>> services or processes, at least for the forseeable future.
>>>
>>> However, "introspection" is definitely within scope for Ironic. Even
>>> though we couldn't agree on the details during Juno, we are going to
>>> revisit this at the Kilo summit. This is an important feature for many
>>> of our current users, and multiple proof of concept implementations of
>>> this have been done by different parties over the last year.
>>>
>>> It may be entirely possible that no one else in our developer
>>> community is using the term "introspection" in the way that I've
>>> defined it above -- if so, that's fine, I can stop calling that
>>> "introspection", but I don't know a better word for the thing that is
>>> find-unknown-hardware.
>>>
>>> Suggestions welcome,
>>> Devananda
>>>
>>>
>>> P.S.
>>>
>>> For what it's worth, googling for "hardware discovery" yields several
>>> results related to identifying unknown network-connected devices and
>>> adding them to inventory systems, which is the way that I'm using the
>>> term right now, so I don't feel completely off in continuing to say
>>> "discovery" when I mean "find unknown network devices and add them to
>>> Ironic".
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
>>> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
>>>
>>
>>
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