Re: Bug#263015: ITP: sblim-cmpi-base -- Base Instrumentation for CMPI (Linux)
Hi,
> There were so many unexpanded acronyms in this description (CIM, CIMOM,
> CMPI, WBEM) that I have no idea what the package does after reading it.
> Would you mind expanding the description a bit?
In fact, the description was a bit hard to read, so I'll fix them in my
packages. Short explanation:
All these things are parts of an official standard of system management
infrastructure, defined by DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force,
http://www.dmtf.org). The standard defines a kind of object-oriented,
language-indepenedent environment which allows accessing to many system
and/or application parameters (for example: network interface
configuration, application server settings, mounted filesystems etc.).
DMTF compliant system consists of: CIMOM daemon responsible for allowing
access to management objects and managing plugins (aka providers); WBEM
client which can connect to CIMOM and allow viewing/manipulating
management objects; providers - plugins which manage various aspects of
the system (for example, network interface provider can view and set
network interface parameters, like IP address, mask, MAC address etc.).
Some contemporary Systems have some WBEM capabilities implemented, for
example Microsoft's WMI is an adaptation of WBEM/CIM standard, HP-UX and
other big UNIX systems.
Explanations of some DMTF acronyms:
WBEM - Web Based Enterprise Management - a set of management and
internet standard technologies developed to unify the management of
enterprise computing environments. It is a kind of umbrella for many
substandards it consists: CIM, encoding specification, CMPI, xmlCIM,
CIM over HTTP etc.
CIM stands for Common Information Model - a set of classes defining
various aspects of managed system, for example CIM_NetworkAdapter is a
class which represents network device. Classes can be organized into
parent-child hierarchies, for example CIM_NetworkAdapters is derived
from CIM_LogicalDevice which is derived from some other class (full or
even partial description of standard CIM classes is quite a big topic,
so I won't describe it in this post). These classes don't map directly
to, say, C++ classes.
CIMOM stands for CIM Object Manager which is a process (daemon)
responsible for managing all classes, class instances, instrumentation
provicers etc. CIMOM as such cannot manage any aspect od computer system
(except of itself, maybe). It needs management providers to be installed
to become functional. Think of it as of a kind of object broker - in
some aspects it similiar to a object broker in CORBA.
Instrumentation Providers are plugin attached to CIMOM which implement
core management functionality. Most of stuff, like activation,
communication with WBEM client is implemented within CIMOM, so providers
are usually as simple as functionality they implement is.
CMPI is a standard of C/C++ interface for Instrumentation Providers. It
is intended to make implementation of CIMOM-independed providers
possible. That means, you can switch CIMOM (uninstall old , then install
a new one, maybe from another vendot) and find all your plugins
(Instrumentation Providers) still working correctly. It also helps
provider developer as one does not need to bother about technicalities
of different CIMOM implementations.
For more information see http://www.dmtf.org and
http://openwbem.sourceforge.net.
Regards,
rle
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