OpenBMC Is Aiming For Its Major Debut In Early 2019

The OpenBMC project hosted by the Linux Foundation to begin providing open-source Baseboard Management Controller firmware stacks is planning for its first major/official release in 2019 as this collaborative community project from leading software and hardware vendors.

Sai Dasari presented last month at the Open-Source Firmware Conference about this "alternative firmware stack" targeting BMCs for servers and other data center / enterprise hardware. The current OpenBMC is forged from the original efforts by Facebook and IBM engineers but now with taking cues from Microsoft, Intel, Google, and other organizations. OpenBMC itself relies on a unified firmware interface and runs a Yocto embedded Linux distribution whereby the different BMC services from firmware updating to sensor monitoring is exposed over D-Bus and does rely on systemd.

OpenBMC can work with different BMC firmware images for handling different machine hardware. OpenBMC as a collaborative project is planning for its initial feature freeze around the start of the new year. Their first release target date is set to occur around the start of February.

Among the features being worked on for the early OpenBMC release(s) are user management, KVM-over-IP, signed firmware updating, IPMI 2.0 support, IPv6 support, Secure Boot handling, SSH-based Serial-over-LAN, dynamic sensor configuration and scanning, thermal management, LED management, event logging, and other common BMC software functionality.

Features expected down the road are PCIe switch management, NVMe management, GPU management, component recovery, power capping, host console redirection, and out-of-box firmware updates.

Those wanting to learn more can checkout the PDF slide deck or OSFC 2018 conference recording below. The OpenBMC project site is OpenBMC.org.