puppet-conrep

Puppet type & provider to modify BIOS of HP servers using conrep

Usage

List conrep resources:

puppet resource conrep

puppet apply -e "conrep{ 'default': intelprocessorturbomode => 'Enabled' }"

In a manifest:

conrep { 'default':
	intelhyperthreading => 'Enabled' 
}

In a class:

class { 'hyperthreading_on':
	conrep { 'default':
		intelhyperthreading => 'Enabled',
	}
}

Notes:

• There's only one collection of BIOS settings per host so there's only one conrep resource per host, the name is hardcoded to 'default'.
• Property names must conform to the Puppet grammar, as defined in grammar.ra in the Puppet source. Thus 'Intel_Hyperthreading' becomes 'intelhyperthreading'.
• You may want to run this code (and therefore conrep) only when required - running conrep may interfere with reading the realtime clock from the CMOS (see footnote 4 here: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25686.html)

Regenerating lib/puppet/type/conrep.rb

It may be necessary to regenerate the Ruby code for the provider if new BIOS settings are added or names change. Here's an example of how to do this:

./gen_conrep_type.rb /opt/hp/hp-scripting-tools/etc/conrep.xml lib/puppet/type/conrep.rb

Design choices

Ideally there would be a single type for managing BIOS settings across all hardware platforms and a provider per-vendor. However, the target is a moving one; vendors have different names for the same BIOS setting, BIOS revisions can change property names ('name-creep'), new hardware may introduce new settings. Owing to the fact that Puppet doesn't support dynamic property names (see http://grokbase.com/t/gg/puppet-dev/1254htyrr9/how-to-allow-user-specified-property-names-in-provider-code) the names of properties must be pre-defined.

One option would be to map between a setting (e.g. C-states) and a well-defined name, but there are drawbacks to this approach:

• what to do it a setting is only supported by HP and not Oracle (for example)
• if a setting's name changes the mappings would have to be updated

After considering these points I implemented a type & provider for HP hardware. The conrep utility is used under the hood to query and change settings. In order to make life easier in the face of name-creep, the code for the type can be regenerated automatically using XML output from conrep (the provider doesn't contain any hard-coded property names and therefore shouldn't need to be changed so often). This auto-generation may also be needed to support different BIOS revisions that have different names for settings.

Because property names are auto-generated they can be non-intuitive, for example 'intelrhyperthreadingoptions' instead of plain 'hyperthreading'. As mentioned above, I don't want to have to maintain a static mapping and hence have chosen not to use more friendly names. Running 'puppet resource conrep' on a server is a good way to determine the name of the relevant property.