Overview

The Bare Metal service supports BIOS configuration for bare metal
nodes. It allows administrators to retrieve and apply the desired BIOS
settings via CLI or REST API. The desired BIOS settings are applied
during manual cleaning.

Prerequisites

Bare metal servers must be configured by the administrator to be
managed via ironic hardware type that supports BIOS configuration.

Enabling hardware types

Enable a specific hardware type that supports BIOS configuration.
Refer to /install/enabling-drivers for how to enable a hardware
type.

Enabling hardware interface

To enable the bios interface:

[DEFAULT]
enabled_bios_interfaces = no-bios

Append the actual bios interface name supported by the enabled
hardware type to enabled_bios_interfaces with comma
separated values in ironic.conf.

All available in-tree bios interfaces are listed in setup.cfg file in
the source code tree, for example:

ironic.hardware.interfaces.bios =
    fake = ironic.drivers.modules.fake:FakeBIOS
    no-bios = ironic.drivers.modules.noop:NoBIOS

Retrieve BIOS settings

To retrieve the cached BIOS configuration from a specified node:

$ baremetal node bios setting list <node>

BIOS settings are cached on each node cleaning operation or when
settings have been applied successfully via BIOS cleaning steps. The
return of above command is a table of last cached BIOS settings from
specified node. If -f json is added as suffix to above
command, it returns BIOS settings as following:

[
  {
    "setting name":
      {
        "name": "setting name",
        "value": "value"
      }
  },
  {
    "setting name":
      {
        "name": "setting name",
        "value": "value"
      }
  },
  ...
]

To get a specified BIOS setting for a node:

$ baremetal node bios setting show <node> <setting-name>

If -f json is added as suffix to above command, it
returns BIOS settings as following:

{
  "setting name":
    {
      "name": "setting name",
      "value": "value"
    }
}

Configure BIOS settings

Two manual_cleaning
steps are available for managing nodes’ BIOS settings:

Factory reset

This cleaning step resets all BIOS settings to factory default for a
given node:

{
  "target":"clean",
  "clean_steps": [
    {
      "interface": "bios",
      "step": "factory_reset"
    }
  ]
}

The factory_reset cleaning step does not require any
arguments, as it resets all BIOS settings to factory defaults.

Apply BIOS configuration

This cleaning step applies a set of BIOS settings for a node:

{
  "target":"clean",
  "clean_steps": [
    {
      "interface": "bios",
      "step": "apply_configuration",
      "args": {
        "settings": [
          {
            "name": "name",
            "value": "value"
          },
          {
            "name": "name",
            "value": "value"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

The representation of apply_configuration cleaning step
follows the same format of manual_cleaning. The desired BIOS settings can be
provided via the settings argument which contains a list of
BIOS options to be applied, each BIOS option is a dictionary with
name and value keys.

To check whether the desired BIOS configuration is set properly, use
the command mentioned in the Retrieve
BIOS settings section.