OpenBMC 2.11 Released As The Leading Open-Source Linux Distro For BMCs

With OpenBMC 2.10 never having materialized beyond a release candidate, the release of OpenBMC 2.11 today is a big one with roughly a year's worth of changes since OpenBMC 2.9. OpenBMC 2.11 brings many improvements for this Linux distribution intended for baseboard management controllers (BMCs) on servers and other management controllers.

OpenBMC is a Linux Foundation project but continues to be pushed along largely by Meta (Facebook) and a handful of other organizations like IBM, Google, Arm, and Microsoft. OpenBMC is based on Yocto and to date mostly supports a range of Facebook/Meta systems as well as some Google, IBM, and Raptor systems.

Today's OpenBMC 2.11 release brings better support for the ASpeed AST2600 SoC that will be increasingly used by servers moving forward for BMCs. OpenBMC 2.11 also adds an updated U-Boot that now has working Secure Boot, and a variety of other changes to improve OpenBMC and its various targets -- albeit the targets supported are still limited outside of the select hyperscalers backing the project. One of the exceptions of a readily-available, lower-cost x86 server board with OpenBMC available as an option is the ASRock Rack E3C246D4I for Xeon E-2100 processors.

OpenBMC 2.11 and more details on the project in general can be found via GitHub.