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diff --git a/README.rst b/README.rst index 795839672..9b2299aae 100644 --- a/README.rst +++ b/README.rst @@ -3,7 +3,12 @@ Ironic Ironic is an Incubated OpenStack project which aims to provision bare metal machines instead of virtual machines, forked from the -Nova Baremetal driver. +Nova Baremetal driver. It is best thought of as a bare metal +hypervisor **API** and a set of plugins which interact with +the bare metal hypervisors. By default, it will use PXE and IPMI +in concert to provision and turn on/off machines, but Ironic +also supports vendor-specific plugins which may implement additional +functionality. ----------------- Project Resources @@ -50,6 +55,26 @@ An Ironic deployment will be composed of the following components: booted on-demand. The agent is never run inside a tenant instance. - A **Database** and a DB API for storing persistent state of the Manager and Drivers. + +In addition to the two types of drivers, BMCDriver and DeploymentDriver, there +are three categories of driver functionality: core, common, and vendor: + +- "Core" functionality represents the minimal API for that driver type, eg. + power on/off for a BMCDriver. +- "Common" functionality represents an extended but supported API, and any + driver which implements it must be consistent with all other driver + implementations of that functionality. For example, if a driver supports + enumerating PCI devices, it must return that list as well-structured JSON. In + this case, Ironic may validate the API input's structure, but will pass it + unaltered to the driver. This ensures compatibility for common features + across drivers. +- "Vendor" functionality allows an excemption to the API contract when a vendor + wishes to expose unique functionality provided by their hardware and is + unable to do so within the core or common APIs. In this case, Ironic will + neither store nor introspect the messages passed between the API and the + driver. + + ----------- Development ----------- |