Innovations in infrastructure firmware for the IBM z13
M. Troester, P. J. Clas, M. Kuenzel, I. Leoshkevich, Philip Schulz, B. D. Valentine, M. Becht, V. Gorbik, Preetham Lobo, Oliver Marquardt, S. Stork, Tobias Webel · IBM Journal of Research and Development · 2015
In this paper, we describe advances in the Support Element (SE) and Flexible Support Processor firmware design for the IBM z13™. Significant changes in hardware packaging, system control structure, and internal service network topology required major adaptations in critical hardware management components. The Configuration Manager redesign applied a modular programming approach to split a previously tightly coupled code base into isolated and now separately maintainable and testable units. The Hardware Object Model component was extended by a language-independent inter-process query interface based on concepts used in graph query languages. A licensing procedure, Feature on Demand, was refactored to a smart-card-based approach. In the networking firmware, new hardware platforms required a redesigned SE location detection mechanism to guarantee redundant accessibility via separated network paths. The introduction of a virtual self-boot engine (vSBE) for chip initialization provided hardware designers with a simplified means to efficiently integrate initialization procedures into firmware. An interpreter executes these hardware initialization procedures, avoiding the need for translation to programming languages. In addition to an in-depth introduction of the new design aspects, this paper outlines the improvements achieved with respect to development and bring-up efficiency as well as hardware initialization time.