Open Stack

Hi all,

The ipminative driver Is currently an anomaly in ironic’s tree, despite the driver being initially deprecated in Newton[1], and   our desire to drop them reiterated on the mailing list in December[2], it was has not been removed from the tree prior to the Ocata release.

At the PTG the ironic team had a short discussion about the ipminative (aka pyghmi) driver — the conclusion was that unless third party CI was run against the driver, we would be forced to follow through on the deprecation and remove it. Testing in upstream CI, against VirtualBMC, was mostly rejected due to both the ipminative driver and virtualbmc using the same python ipmi library (pyghmi), and therefore not being a valid test case. Additionally, further adding urgency to the removal, several active ironic contributors who have tested ipminative drivers in real-world environments have reported them as unstable.

The promise of a native python driver to talk to ipmi in ironic is great, but without proper testing and stability, keeping it in-tree does more harm to ironic users than good — in fact, there’s very little indication to a deployer using ironic that the driver may not work stably.

Therefore, I’m giving the mailing list a two week warning — unless volunteers come willing to run third party CI against the ipminative drivers in the next two weeks, I will be submitting a patch to remove them entirely from the tree. The driver could then be moved into ironic-staging-drivers by any interested contributors.

-
Jay Faulkner
OSIC

Related-bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ironic/+bug/1671532

[1] https://docs.openstack.org/releasenotes/ironic/newton.html
[2] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-December/108666.html