[RFE] Add support for setting multiple BIOS attributes at the same time

[jmencak]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Badfish currently supports dumping BIOS attributes. This is a very useful backup strategy to capture the state of the BIOS if you intend to make any changes to it. However, I do not see a similar restore strategy, where you could feed badfish this backup/dump of attributes and restore the BIOS to the desired state. I understand this can be tricky to implement, because there can be many group settings, such as SysProfile, complicating things. Please share thoughts if this would be feasible to implement or not.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Alternatively, I believe badfish should at least support setting multiple BIOS attributes in one badfish invocation. Only 1 attribute=value seems to be supported at this point.

Additional Info

This feature would help:

• people return the systems with the original BIOS settings
• allow labs to set certain BIOS settings without doing multiple machine reboots

[sadsfae]

Hey @jmencak due to the mechanics of the backend iDRAC legacy "batching" system and limitations behind it, it's quite a challenge to batch up multiple BIOS attribute changes. The way it's implemented in Badfish currently is for singular adjusted values.

Have you had a look instead at the export / import profile feature? If the value(s) you are after are supported there that's a more ideal way of setting multiple values (in reality managing "profiles"):

https://github.com/redhat-performance/badfish#export-server-configuration-profile https://github.com/redhat-performance/badfish?tab=readme-ov-file#import-server-configuration-profile