Hacker News Reader

Comment by jebr224 | Hacker News Reader

I do development on openbmc (https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc) which is an open source bmc implantation using bitbake, primarily targeted to aspeed, and nuvoton bmc chips.

View on HN

Can a mere mortal usefully deploy openbmc on a small number of servers?

Not really. You need support from the manufacturer.

Recent BMC firmwares have openbmc under the hood, with the industry using it as a base for further development or customisation.

I was looking into this recently. It doesn’t seem like you can easily get your hands on BMC hardware. There is one project I found where they’re using an FPGA and everything is open source but it still looked far from easy.

Afaik the problem is typically not hardware but software, since most server motherboards come with a bmc chip on it. Are you designing a motherboard? All i would ask for a bmc is root access. But now everyone (but the big players, who design their own motherboards) is basically stuck with a stupid embedded linux with shitty software that has half-backed features they don't even need, but now need to care about. When all you'd need would be a way to access a host serial console, read sensors, control boot sequence and perhaps re-flash the bios, ie most likely just basic interactions on serial interfaces.

We got into that when we started expecting servers to have VGA and PS/2 ports because an RS-232 console would not be very useful with a GUI.

Is there a modular standard for BMCs?

There are two standards for pluggable BMC's

  - runbmc (https://www.opencompute.org/documents/ocp-runbmc-daughterboard-card-design-specification-v1-4-1-pdf)

  - DC-SCM https://www.opencompute.org/documents/ocp-dc-scm-spec-rev-1-0-pdf

I have only glanced the surface of these specs.

I was interested in building a board from scratch with a BMC on it

> Are you designing a motherboard? Yes, the team I work for designs server motherboards.

BMC security is what keeps me up at night. Firmware software quality is low, and often not up to date. I think openbmc does a good job in both respects.

If the servers in question happen to be on the list of supported hardware, quite possibly. (I don't know of any up-to-date online list, but running `source setup` in the root of the source tree will print it.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com