decisions

Design decisions

Short records of non-obvious choices — especially the ones that look wrong but are intentional, so they don't get re-litigated. Newest first.

Drivers

Capability-aware CLI dispatch: gate on supports(), then cast to the rich driver union (#27)

Each subcommand declares the capability it needs; _client(args, cap) builds the driver and rejects it with a clean message + exit 1 (not an AttributeError) when it lacks the capability, deriving the command name from args.command. _rich_client wraps it and casts to KVMClient | FakeDriver (the RichDriver alias) — which looks like a type lie. It's sound: RedfishDriver is the only capability-partial driver and it lacks exactly HID/Video/Events, so gating on one of those excludes it, leaving the PiKVM-family/Fake surface that carries the convenience kwargs (slow=, quality=, stream=) the minimal capability protocols don't declare. A future rich-but-partial driver would need its own Protocol rather than this cast.

RedfishDriver.hard_cycle exists even though hard_cycle is not a capability

power-cycle gates on POWER, but hard_cycle isn't part of the Power protocol — KVMClient/FakeDriver carried it as a convenience, RedfishDriver didn't, so power-cycle --driver redfish would AttributeError despite a BMC plainly having power. Added hard_cycle (force-off → on) so the invariant "advertises POWER ⇒ the CLI power-cycle works" holds for every power driver. Its off_delay/on_delay default to 0.0 (unlike KVMClient's ATX settle delays) because the two gated power ops already block on the real PowerState transition.

It is now the third copy of the same power_off_hard → power_on composition (KVMClient, FakeDriver, RedfishDriver). A shared PowerMixin.hard_cycle (composed from the protocol methods, with the settle delays as an overridable class attribute) is the better home and would make the invariant structural — deferred on purpose: the clean version changes KVMClient.hard_cycle's public off_delay/ on_delay signature and touches the primary (real-hardware) PiKVM path, which is out of scope for the CLI-dispatch change. Tracked as follow-up, not churned into #27.

--redfish-auth selector, defaulting to session

Session auth is the BMC norm (and what real iDRAC/iLO recommend), so it stays the default. But sushy-tools' --fake emulator exposes no SessionService, and a BMC can administratively disable session or basic auth (cf. #29) — an "unlocked" --driver redfish that could only do session auth couldn't authenticate to either. The basic opt-in keeps the unlock honest. It's redfish-only and ignored by the PiKVM family.

Two-layer Redfish testing: in-process mock for the CLI path, external sushy-tools for independence

The pure-stdlib tests/redfish_emulator.py validates the full CLI → driver → HTTP path in the default hermetic suite (test_cli_redfish.py). The opt-in integration job (tests/integration/) runs the same surface against DMTF-conformant sushy-tools sushy-emulator --fake — an independently authored implementation, so a spec assumption shared by our driver and our own mock can't hide. sushy's fake driver has no SessionService, hence the basic-auth path; it applies power transitions with a short simulated delay that the driver's wait loop absorbs. The --fake backend needs no libvirt/QEMU and no nested KVM, so it runs on a stock GitHub runner (pip-install + self-started subprocess — no Docker, no services: container). The fixture also honors KVM_PILOT_REDFISH_URL so the same tests can run against an already-running emulator — the local-Docker fallback (quay.io/metal3-io/sushy-tools) when sushy-tools isn't on PATH.

Kept the 4 unimplemented sensing protocols (BootProgress, Sensors, SerialConsole, Watchdog)

They landed with zero implementers, which reads like dead code. Kept on purpose: they are the documented seam for BMC drivers, and they're no longer speculative — FakeDriver and RedfishDriver implement BootProgress, RedfishDriver implements Sensors. SerialConsole/Watchdog are the IPMI/SOL seam. Don't delete them as "dead code."

PiKVMDriver is a base class with GLKVMDriver/BliKVMDriver subclasses (inheritance, not composition)

The GL/Bli devices are API-compatible forks — a subclass that overrides only the deltas is the natural shape, and there are ≥2 real subclasses. (General guidance still favors composition; this is the case where inheritance genuinely fits.) KVMClient/PiKVMClient stay as aliases of PiKVMDriver so no public API breaks.

GLKVMDriver maps every /api/* 404 → ApiDisabledError

Looks over-broad. It's intentional: GL firmware disables the whole /api/* surface by default, so a 404 on any endpoint is overwhelmingly "API disabled," and that's the dominant first-contact failure on a GL-RM1PE. The stock PiKVMDriver sets no hint, so its 404s stay generic (see test_stock_pikvm_404_is_a_plain_error).

Quirk registry holds only documented/observed facts

GLKVM_QUIRKS is seeded with the single documented quirk and grows from real testing (source="observed"). Never invent firmware-version-specific data — the project's honesty rule (alpha, untested on hardware) applies to the quirk DB too.

Redfish action POSTs keep the default retry (on transient errors)

Reviewers flagged retrying non-idempotent POSTs (reset/insert). Kept: those ops are effectively idempotent (resetting twice is still reset; inserting twice is still inserted), retry only fires on transient 409/503/network, and it matches the existing KVMClient behavior.

One make_driver_from_config() shared by the CLI and MCP server

The driver-from-HostConfig dispatch is shape-aware (fake takes no credentials; the PiKVM family builds via from_config). It lives in one place so cfg.driver is honored identically by both consumers (used in ≥2 places → justified helper).

A dedicated RedfishHTTP transport instead of reusing http.py

http.py is PiKVM-specific (X-KVMD-* auth, the ok/result envelope) and discards status/headers, which Redfish needs (202, X-Auth-Token, Location, ETag). Generalizing http.py is the separate Step 2 (#6).

Vision

Added an os_running phase token

For BootProgress=OSRunning, which means "OS handed off, running" — no existing token fit, and the alternative (returning None) wrongly signals "can't report." Cheap to add now that SYSTEM_PROMPT interpolates ALL_PHASES.

AnthropicBackend validates its API key lazily (at first network use)

So analyzer paths resolved by a cheap gate (e.g. power_off) run offline with no key — classify --driver fake needs no credentials. Mirrors the lazy model resolution.

Safety

Dry-run short-circuits BEFORE the confirm callback

SafetyPolicy.guard checks dry_run first and never invokes confirm for a skipped call. The old order (confirm first) made --dry-run prompt — and in non-interactive automation block with exit 3 — for calls that were never going to be sent. Consequence: a denying confirm callback is not exercised in dry-run; tests that want to see the callback fire must run live (dry_run=False).

HID input is destructive

type_text/press_key/send_shortcut/key_event/mouse_click guard through hid.* ops: keystrokes land on a live console (rm -rf is one type_text away), so "changes target state" clearly applies. Mouse moves stay ungated (cursor position alone changes nothing). Known cost: under the CLI's interactive confirm, key-spam helpers like enter_bios prompt per keystroke — --yes or a session-scoped confirm is the escape hatch; refining that UX is follow-up work.

is_powered_on() fails open when ATX sensing is absent

With no ATX board, kvmd reports enabled: false and the power LED is meaningless. Reporting "off" there made the vision layer short-circuit every classification to power_off on ATX-less devices, suppressing all snapshots. Same fail-open rationale as has_video_signal. Caller-visible change: wait_for_power_state(False) on an ATX-less device now times out (the device cannot sense power) instead of returning instantly with a false success.

Ambiguous transport failures are never auto-retried for POSTs

A read-phase reset/timeout means the device may have already executed the request; re-firing a power/HID/MSD POST could run it twice. Connect-phase failures (nothing was sent) stay retryable for every method. Retrying 409/503 stays safe for all methods: those are definitive "rejected" responses.

Redfish transitional PowerState maps to unknown, not power_off

PoweringOn/PoweringOff/Paused (DSP0268) are mid-transition; only a literal Off becomes power_off. Conservative choice: a wait loop must not conclude a host is down while it is coming up.

snapshot() lost its quality parameter

kvmd silently ignores preview_quality without preview=1, and the preview path downscales to ~1/5 resolution (which would break OCR/vision) — there is no full-resolution re-encode-at-quality endpoint. The parameter was a no-op lie; deleted rather than deprecated while the API is alpha.

Process

Most structural choices came from adversarial review passes (find → verify → fix). The fixes are in the code; this file preserves the rejected findings and tradeoff rationale. The Redfish driver's spec grounding lives in redfish.md.