Subject: Item #267: PowerPC binding: "hostid" property
Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]

P1275 Open Firmware Working Group Proposal -- Proposal #267 Ver 1.0

Title:		"hostid" property for PowerPC

Author:		Steve Zucker

Date:		5/5/95

Ed/Tech:	Technical

Synopsis:	Require "hostid" property to return unique machine id

Doc & Version:	PowerPC Processor Binding

Problem:	The current draft PowerPC binding does not provide
		a means for an OS to determine a unique "host"
		identification for the machine.  This is needed for
		most software licensing schemes.  It is allowed for by
		the "residual data structure", but is not explicitly
		available in an Open Firmware property.

Proposal:	Add a "hostid" property to the root node of the
		device tree, analogous to the "idprom" property
		specified in Annex D, section D.3.1.2 (page 202)
		of IEEE Std 1275-1994, but (1) containing only the
		host identification, leaving out the Ethernet address
		and "other information" that are in a Sun-specified
		structure, and (2) being a NUL-terminated string
		rather than a (known, fixed length) structure.

		In particular, add the following text to the "Root node
		properties" section of the PowerPC processor binding:

		-------------------------------------------------------
		"hostid"
			Standard property, encoded as with encode-string,
			that contains the unique identification (vendor
			ID and serial number) of the computer system.
		-------------------------------------------------------

		Notes:

		The residual data structure defined in version 1.1 of
		the PReP spec has a 64-byte "Serial" field in its
		"vital product data" that contains the required
		information.  An Open Firmware implementation could
		remove trailing padding (e.g., NULs or spaces), replace
		any internal NULs with another character (e.g., underscore
		or space), and encode-string the result.

[ P1275 Item #267 -- Received: Fri May  5 13:36:57 PDT 1995 ]