AMI Is Getting Involved With Open-Source Firmware Development

Well known BIOS provider AMI is getting in on the open-source system firmware game around OpenBMC and related projects.

AMI's (American Megatrends) proprietary BIOS offerings are well known and used by many motherboards but it turns out they are also getting involved with the open-source system firmware game given their engineering expertise and ability to provide services around it.

AMI is getting involved in the open-source firmware projects and participated in last month's Open Compute Project (OCP) system firmware call. Some details on their initial work can be found via the call that's embedded below.

AMI is working on the Linux Foundation's OpenBMC, EDK II, and related open-source components. AMI is maintaining their own trees but have said they intend to contribute back to the Open Compute Project community. AMI intends to sell support services and provide a hardened open-source tree for OCP server platforms compared to the upstream sources.

The Open Compute Project is continuing to generate interest from major industry players and open-source firmware at large continuing to be of increasing interest for security/audit reasons and so engineers can manage the firmware as they see fit. Given the increasing rise of OpenBMC, LinuxBoot, Coreboot, etc, it's not too surprising that AMI wants to get involved in this growing area.

AMI getting involved in open-source firmware was mentioned via this blog post by 9elements Security consulting firm where they outlined the current state of public AMD / Arm / Intel open-source firmware support. They note, "Intel is currently one of the top-pushing companies in the open-source firmware space. Also the OCP's Open System Firmware initiative is redefining the boundaries for server systems - overall we do quite some movement in the open-source firmware world - however most of the information is still not publicly confirmed and can only be shared through NDA's. We hope this changes in the future."