The OpenBMC project is a

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit technology consortium founded in 2000 as a merger between Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group to standardize Linux, support its growth, and promote its commercial adoption. Additi ...

collaborative

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

project whose goal is to produce an open source implementation of the

Baseboard Management Controller The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is a set of computer interface specifications for an autonomous computer subsystem that provides management and monitoring capabilities independently of the host system's CPU, firmware (BIOS or ...

s (BMC) Firmware Stack. OpenBMC is a

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

for BMCs meant to work across heterogeneous systems that include enterprise,

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a mult ...

(HPC),

telecommunication Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that fe ...

s, and cloud-scale

data center A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunic ...

History

In 2014, four

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

programmers at a Facebook

hackathon A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest, datathon or codefest; a portmanteau of hacking and marathon) is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 hours. Th ...

event created a prototype open-source BMC firmware stack named OpenBMC. In 2015, IBM collaborated with

Rackspace Rackspace Technology, Inc. is an American cloud computing company based in Windcrest, Texas, an inner suburb of San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Austin, Texas, as well as in Australia, Canada, United ...

on an open-source BMC firmware stack also named OpenBMC. These projects were similar in name and concept only. In March 2018, OpenBMC became a Linux Foundation project and converged on the IBM stack. Founding organizations of the OpenBMC project are

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

, IBM,

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

, and Facebook. A technical steering committee was formed to guide the project with representation from the five founding companies. Brad Bishop from IBM was elected chair of the technical steering committee. In April 2019,

Arm Holdings Arm is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England. Its primary business is in the design of ARM processors (CPUs). It also designs other chips, provides software development tools under the DS-5, RealView an ...

joined as the 6th member of the OpenBMC technical steering committee.

Features

OpenBMC uses the

Yocto Project The Yocto Project is a Linux Foundation collaborative open source project whose goal is to produce tools and processes that enable the creation of Linux distributions for embedded and IoT software that are independent of the underlying architectu ...

as the underlying building and distribution generation framework. OpenBMC uses

D-Bus In computing, D-Bus (short for "Desktop Bus") is a message-oriented middleware mechanism that allows communication between multiple processes running concurrently on the same machine. D-Bus was developed as part of the freedesktop.org project, ...

as an

inter-process communication In computer science, inter-process communication or interprocess communication (IPC) refers specifically to the mechanisms an operating system provides to allow the processes to manage shared data. Typically, applications can use IPC, categori ...

(IPC). OpenBMC includes a

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...

for interacting with the firmware stack. OpenBMC added

Redfish Redfish is a common name for several species of fish. It is most commonly applied to certain deep-sea rockfish in the genus ''Sebastes'', red drum from the genus ''Sciaenops'' or the reef dwelling snappers in the genus ''Lutjanus''. It is also app ...

support for hardware management.

Systems

; Google/Rackspace partnership : ''Barreleye G2 / Zaius''—two-socket server platform using

POWER9 POWER9 is a family of superscalar, multithreading, multi-core microprocessors produced by IBM, based on the Power ISA. It was announced in August 2016. The POWER9-based processors are being manufactured using a 14 nm FinFET process, in ...

processors. ; IBM : ''Power Systems AC922'' also "Witherspoon" or "Newell"—two-socket, 2U Accelerated Computing (AC) node using POWER9 processors with up to 6 Nvidia Volta GPUs. AC922 was used in the U.S. Department of Energy's Sierra and

Summit A summit is a point on a surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. The topography, topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous. The term (mountain top) is generally used ...

supercomputers. ; Raptor Computing Systems / Raptor Engineering : ''Talos II''—two-socket workstation and development platform; available as 4U server, tower, or EATX mainboard. :''Talos II Lite'' – single-socket version of the Talos II mainboard, made using the same PCB. :''Blackbird'' – single-socket

microATX In computer design, microATX (sometimes referred to as μATX, uATX or mATX) is a standard motherboard form factor introduced in December 1997. The maximum size of a microATX motherboard is . However, there are examples of motherboards using micr ...

platform using SMT4 Sforza POWER9 processors, 4–8 cores, 2 RAM slots (supporting up to 256 GiB total)

u-bmc

u-bmc is a project which is developed parallel to OpenBMC but uses

gRPC gRPC (Google Remote Procedure Calls) is a cross-platform open source high performance Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework. gRPC was initially created by Google, which has used a single general-purpose RPC infrastructure called Stubby to conne ...

instead of IPMI.

References

{{reflist 2014 software Embedded Linux Linux Foundation projects Out-of-band management