mctp-ncsi: NC-SI over MCTP implementation

mctp-nsci is a small utility to implement NC-SI (and Ethernet) over MCTP, as specified by DMTF DSP0261, on top of the Linux kernel's MCTP socket support.

This is implemented by creating a Linux "tap" network device. Packets sent through this device will be encapsulated as MCTP messages and sent to a MCTP endpoint, specified by EID (and optional network ID, for multi-net setups).

Usage

mctp-ncsi [--ethernet] [--name IFNAME] <addr>

Where:

• addr is a MCTP address in the form eid or net,eid. The eid can either be specified in decimal or hex (requiring a leading 0x).
• IFNAME is an optional interface name to request

If the --ethernet argument is given, mctp-ncsi will also implement the Ethernet-over-MCTP protocol.

If --name IFNAME is given, this will be used as the tap device name, otherwise a default of tapN will be allocated by the kernel.

Once the process is running, you'll want to bring the device up:

mctp-ncsi --name ncsi0 10 &
ip link set ncsi0 up

Limitations

This code is only a prototype at this stage! Test coverage is manual and not comprehensive.

Only one interface is supported currently. Because of the nature of sockets, only one process can bind() to the required MCTP types, so we can't run multiple interfaces over separate processes.