[Announce] firmware-tools GUI now available

[Charles_Rose at Dell.com]

firmware-tools-devel-bounces at lists.us.dell.com wrote:
>     I am pleased to announce that firmware-tools now has a
> GUI tool for doing system inventory and firmware updates.
> 
>     The executable is called 'inventory_firmware_gui' and is
> available in firmware-tools version 1.5.1 and higher.
> 
>     The GUI has been developed using Glade and pyglade. It is
> developed on my Fedora 7 system, but should run on RHEL4/5. I
> have not yet tested on SLES, but it should run there as well.
> The entire GUI weighs in at less than 1000 lines of code, which
> 
>     I intend to send a note to linux-poweredge for this later this
> week. Please bang on it and let me know if you see any issues.
> 
> Known bugs:
>     -- the "About" dialog box crashes on RHEL4
>     -- if you click the 'close' decoration before the window
> has fully initialized, it crashes.
> 
> Future enhancements:
>     -- add status icons to the update firmware status page
>     -- add a spinner to the update status page so you can watch
> progress 
>     -- add more colors to the main inventory page so you can
> see which devices are out of date.
>     -- others as requested/suggested.

I did some testing on RHEL4 and RHEL5:

RHEL4: I was able to flash the system's BIOS with
inventory_firmware_gui. No problems so far.

RHEL5: I get 104% CPU usage during "Performing system inventory". After
the inventory, the CPU utilization returns to normal:

Cpu2  : 70.1%us, 29.9%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,
0.0%st

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND

13887 root      19   0  383m  25m  12m R  103  0.3   0:03.50
inventory_firmw

"Performing system inventory" takes about 30s.

Another interesting observation was when I strace'd
inventory_firmware_gui, I noticed that the CPU utilization was less than
10% for inventory_firmware_gui, and "performing system inventory" took
6s (5 times faster than normal).

-Charles