Concurrent Maintenance

Overview

Concurrent Maintenance (CM) is the capability to perform hardware maintenance or replacement activities on supported platform components while the system remains operational. This is a guided flow.

The Concurrent Maintenance daemon provides a centralized framework within OpenBMC for managing Concurrent Maintenance operations and tracking their progress through D-Bus interfaces. The daemon coordinates requests originating from external management applications and orchestrates interactions with platform-specific services responsible for executing maintenance procedures.

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Motivation

Modern enterprise systems support maintenance of selected hardware components without requiring a full system shutdown. These maintenance operations often involve coordination across multiple software and hardware components, including:

• Platform inventory services
• Hardware management applications
• VPD management services
• PLDM-based communication services
• External management applications

The Concurrent Maintenance daemon serves as a central orchestration point for these workflows and provides a consistent interface for tracking maintenance operations and their lifecycle.

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Architecture

External Management Application
            |
            v
      Redfish / APIs
            |
            v
+---------------------------------------------+
|           BMC                               |
|   +--------------------------------+        |
|   | Concurrent Maintenance Daemon  |        |
|   +--------------------------------+        |
|                       |                     |
|           +--------------------+            |
|           |                    |            |
|           v                    v            |
|    Inventory Services    Platform Services  |
|           |                    |            |
|           +--------------------+            |
+---------------------------------------------+
                        |
                        v
                  Hardware Actions

The daemon is responsible for:

1. Receiving Concurrent Maintenance requests.
2. Target FRU Lookup (or identification) from Inventory Manager.
3. Concurrent maintenance object lifecycle.
4. Coordinating with platform-specific services.
5. Managing and exposing maintenance state through D-Bus interfaces.

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Supported Maintenance Types

The framework is designed to support different types of Concurrent Maintenance workflows, including:

• FSI Concurrent Maintenance
• BMC Concurrent Maintenance
• Switchboard Concurrent Maintenance

Additional maintenance types may be added in future enhancements.

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D-Bus Service

The daemon owns the following D-Bus service name:

com.ibm.ConcurrentMaintenance

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Build

meson setup build
meson compile -C build

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Service

The daemon is installed as:

com.ibm.ConcurrentMaintenance.service

and launches:

/usr/bin/ibm-concurrent-maintenance