AMD's EPYC 9004 "Genoa" Reference Board Runs The Open-Source OpenBMC

Written by Michael Larabel in Motherboards on 10 November 2022 at 02:30 PM EST. Page 2 of 2. 22 Comments.

AMD went with OpenBMC out of industry/customer interest while I wasn't able to ascertain any other specific reasoning beyond that and the overall maturity of OpenBMC compared to the past.

AMD engineers do acknowledge that some functionality from the web interface of OpenBMC is lacking compared to the traditional BMC stacks, but that they are also working on addressing some of those feature gaps.

Using OpenBMC from the web interface and SSH'ing into the BMC was a delight and worked out well.

For most use-cases, the OpenBMC Phosphor web interface is already featureful enough including an HTML5 KVM remote viewer, firmware upgrading support, sensor monitoring, remote hooks, system power handling, and all of the other standard features expected out of a modern BMC admin interface in the web browser.

Titanite employs an ASpeed AST2600 series BMC on the hardware side. The AST2600 BMC is located on a custom-designed BMC card codenamed "Hawaii".

As for the Titanite 2U reference platform itself, it's a beast: Titanite has two 2000 Watt power supplies, support for 24 DDR5 R/LR DIMMs, 4x16 xGMI links, and can handle up to two 400 Watt Socket SP5 processors.

Hopefully with time we will find more AMD EPYC retail motherboards shipping with the open-source, Linux-based OpenBMC. Kudos to AMD for finally shipping a reference board from the start with OpenBMC.

Now go forth and check out the AMD EPYC Genoa benchmarks from this Titanite server.

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.