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Comment by klysm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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