ASpeed AST2500 SoC DRM Driver Coming To Linux 5.2 Kernel

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ASpeed AST2500 SoC DRM Driver Coming To Linux 5.2 Kernel

For the past few years there has been the ASpeed "AST" DRM display driver for the PCI graphics device and running on the host CPU. Coming to the next kernel cycle, Linux 5.2, is a driver for the ASpeed BMC SoC's graphics display hardware for ARM-based BMC systems...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ASpeed-New-DRM-Linux-5.2

[coder]

Oh great. So, now these awful BMCs can start infecting ARM-based systems. Quite an unwelcome gift, IMO.

I wonder if there's a market opportunity for AMD to offer some competing solution. Mightn't help the ARM world, but at least for EPYC-based servers, it'd be a nice bonus.

[starshipeleven]

Oh great. So, now these awful BMCs can start infecting ARM-based systems. Quite an unwelcome gift, IMO.

Lol no it was not explained clearly.

This is the graphics driver that runs on the BMC's own ARM processor so it can use this graphics hardware on its own to run a screen or render (for remote control) something more advanced than console command line. It won't be amazing but it will at least be a GUI.
Until now there was just the host driver, that was running on the host CPU, be it x86 or ARM or Power.

These BMCs are ARM devices running Linux, and on Aspeed ones you can port OpenBMC project, since Facebook convinced them to do a code drop with most of the hardware support code. This driver will probably be used in OpenBMC or other BMC firmware projects.

https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc

The opensource Power systems from Raptor engineering are using OpenBMC for their BMC firmware.