ASpeed AST2500 SSIF BMC Driver Being Worked On For The Linux Kernel

ARM server vendor Ampere Computing has been working on an SSIF BMC-side driver for the Aspeed ASTC2500 baseboard management controller that they are looking to upstream in the Linux kernel.

SSIF is short for the SMBus System Interface and allows accessing the baseboard management controller by way of the SMBus host controller.

There is already common IPMI SSIF code within the kernel while Ampere Computing has been working on a SSIF driver for the AST2500 BMC. This driver implements the BMC side of the SMBus / SSIF interface, a.k.a. for use with configurations like LinuxBoot / OpenBMC.

The AST2500 is used by many current server motherboards, including Ampere's Mount Snow and Mount Jade reference servers.

This latest Aspeed SSIF BMC driver code, nearly 900 lines in total, can be found via this patch series.

As with an increasing number of server vendors these days, Ampere Computing has also been seeing customer interest in open-source firmware down to the likes of the BMC support. Earlier this year they presented on some of their open-source firmware work. During GitHub.