POWER-based BMC LibreBMC is completely open source.
At the 2022 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit, LibreBMC, an open source baseboard management controller (BMC) solution, will be fully demonstrated by the OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community for the POWER ISA. This comes after the initiative was announced at the OCP Global Summit the previous year.
BMCs make it possible to access and monitor servers remotely. They support the effective management of their server fleets by enterprise data centres and hyperscalers in a safe and secure manner. BMCs have traditionally been created utilising old, closed, and proprietary architectures.
The LibreBMC project, a BMC solution with an entirely open source stack of hardware, software, specs, and tooling, is being showcased in full by the OpenPOWER Foundation. The approach as presented makes use of the Microwatt processor, a softcore developed by the community based on the completely open POWER ISA. The platform complies with the Open Compute Project’s DC-SCM protocol and is powered by the OpenBMC firmware, a Linux Foundation project. LiteX and other open source peripheral IP were used in the development of LibreBMC.
The OPF Special Integration Group known as LibreBMC serves as the project’s governing body. You may find information on the project, including access to all of the source code and documentation, here. Additionally, it served as motivation for Axiado Corporation, a provider of AI-enhanced hardware security and a recent Silver member of the OpenPOWER Foundation, to create their own datacenter-ready secure control module (DC-SCM), Smart SCM solution, which makes use of both the POWER ISA and OpenBMC firmware. At the OpenPOWER exhibit, Axiado will also be demonstrating their product.
Bijan Nowroozi, Chief Technology Officer for the Open Compute Project Foundation, states “Speaking on behalf of the OCP Community, we are excited to see the progress of OpenPOWER’s LibreBMC project, which utilizes OCP’s DC-SCM standard that provides a wonderful open interface for platform resilience, management and orchestration capability, and enables OpenPOWER’s LibreBMC, to increase security and transparency for a next level BMC that supports POWER, ARM and x86 based systems.”
