[HN Gopher] OpenPOWER Foundation announces LibreBMC, a POWER-bas... ___________________________________________________________________ OpenPOWER Foundation announces LibreBMC, a POWER-based, fully open- source BMC Author : rbanffy Score : 184 points Date : 2021-05-10 13:35 UTC (9 hours ago) (HTM) web link (openpowerfoundation.org) (TXT) w3m dump (openpowerfoundation.org) | evilelectron wrote: | How about Pi-KVM (https://pikvm.org/)? Secure, flexible and | extendible. | jhallenworld wrote: | Is it written in FORTH? | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware | | If you look at one of the earlier x-series servers- x3650-M1 I | think, the BMC (IBM calls it an IMM) is daughter board with a PPC | 405 chip. The artwork has "Proudly made in North Carolina" with a | map of North Carolina in etch. You can just see it in the | picture, under the "IBM": | | https://admirestore.top/other/ibm-x3650-rsa-telecharger-pilo... | | Anyway, I wonder if the code is related. I would have thought | this all went to Lenovo. | | What you really need for an open-source BMC, is one that works | with the common Aspeed KVM chips (ARM-based I think, look at | AST2300 and above). This would have the nice effect of avoiding | having to pay AMI for their BMC code. | | Edit: Actually here is the code, it supports Apseed: | | https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc | | What's new in LibreBMC is the hardware toolchain. Frankly, they | should target RISC-V for this. Edit again: it does, using LiteX: | | https://github.com/enjoy-digital/litex | | I'm not sure where Power fits in.. | sennight wrote: | They're replacing openbmc, thankfully - the build system is | absolutely ridiculous. The motivation is to escape binary blob | ARM world. You know that POWER and RISC-V are competing | solutions, right? | Teknoman117 wrote: | All I remember about OpenEmbedded/Yocto was trying to wrap my | then teenage brain around it a decade or so ago when it was | the build system / distribution of choice for Beagleboards | (via Angstrom). | | Ended up going with buildroot instead at the time... | jhallenworld wrote: | Which soft-core Power are they using? They mention Lattice | ECP5, so a fairly small one I assume. | sennight wrote: | An OpenPOWER one, likely this with modification: | https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt | jhallenworld wrote: | Microwatt looks nice (though I wish it was Verilog), it | has a floating point unit which most of the low-end RISC- | Vs do not. | | Also: "Anton Blanchard", Distinguished Engineer: IBM | Total Duration 20 yrs 3 mos | sennight wrote: | Well the same guy (yes, he is a madman) did another one | in Chisel, which is one step removed from Verilog: | https://github.com/antonblanchard/chiselwatt | | I don't spend enough time with FPGAs to even pretend to | have an educated opinion on HDLs. | jhallenworld wrote: | Yeah, they are semantically equivalent, but I'm more | comfortable in Verilog. It used to be that the open | source situation for VHDL was not as good, but it's | clearly improving. | [deleted] | jabl wrote: | > They're replacing openbmc | | The press release says they're planning to use openbmc. The | "LibreBMC" part seems to be about an open HW platform (incl. | created with FOSS tools) for running openbmc. | | Or are you saying openbmc is planning on some major | refactoring? | sennight wrote: | The statement was "run software from OpenBMC"... so that | could mean almost anything - anything except the conclusion | to seem to have drawn. My guess would be that it means | they'll grab some of the python code and carve up the | systemd scripts. I've been living with an openbmc equipped | system for a year or so - there is a lot about it that I | won't miss, especially the way it handles serial | communication. | gnufx wrote: | I don't know why FORTH would come into it. OpenBMC does a | different job to Open Firmware (Sun Openboot v. ILOM). | OpenPOWER boots through Linux -- or at least some of it does. | | What I really need from a BMC is properly-working and secure | IPMI. I don't admin them, so I don't know how how the | implementation on the AC922s I use holds up, but I've only had | poor experience with proprietary BMC software in the past, and | there's considerable appeal to being able to fix it. | | Why should POWER systems use RISC-V rather than their own free | cores? | varispeed wrote: | I wish they disclosed a country of origin for each organisation | participating in the project. I had to click through a lot to | find out some of them are based in countries with appalling human | rights track record. Now I am thinking whether the agenda to | bring open computing is genuine or is it a front to make | dictatorships independent from western technology? | dijit wrote: | > Now I am thinking whether the agenda to bring open computing | is genuine or is it a front to make dictatorships independent | from western technology? | | I mean, technological independence from the US should be a | desire of every country that _isn't_ the US, as the US gives no | rights to foreign nationals or their data, has a history of | backdooring products and is suspected of making some of the | most sophisticated malware the world has ever known. | varispeed wrote: | Well, in its history IBM was aiding the Nazis with | concentration camp infrastructure - making the whole | bureaucracy much easier. I'd rather have technology | restricted for certain countries at risk so anything like | this won't happen in the future. | selfhoster11 wrote: | How is comment not whataboutism? | dijit wrote: | You've positioned it now so that anything I say will sound | sympathetic to Nazis. | | But what if the USA was WW2 Germany, and they had dominion | over your entire technological infrastructure. | | I'm not necessarily saying that's the case, but I'm not so | quick to throw in pure unadulterated trust to any foreign | country, and ultimately, USA could decide the rest of us | are bad for nearly any reason, just look at how much | pressure the US exerts on Sweden, which is hardly known for | human rights abuses. | dsr_ wrote: | Why not both? | | If you have reason to believe that some state-equivalent | espionage group implants malware in machines headed in your | direction, it is to your advantage to defend against that. | | It seems to be the case that human-rights advocates as well as | dictatorships have been such targets. | varispeed wrote: | It's not so much about spying on western infrastructure, but | about using such technology for genocide, racial profiling | (for example restricting certain ethnic groups movements) and | the whole police state infrastructure to keep population | "under control". | toast0 wrote: | How does an open standard remote management card enable | genocide or whatever? Non-open standard management chips | are cheap and off the shelf and work ok; or you know, just | have a tech in the datacenter with a kvm cart; it's not as | nice, but not really a big deal. | | I also don't see a huge difference in genoicde capability | between 2010 servers and 2020 servers, but 2010 servers are | eWaste. Restricting genocidal organizations to ten year old | technology would raise their power bills, but not diminish | genocidal capabilities; and restricting much more would | require immense effort on a global scale. (And, of course, | you would need to get near-global consensus about the | country, which is quite difficult) | Nomentatus wrote: | I do get why you were downvoted; because it's easy for readers | to assume that open source logically HAS to mean open to every | dictator, too. But it doesn't. You're right about that. | | We could have "friendly nation" or "no pirate nation" open | source licenses that do not give North Korea, Iran, Russia, etc | massive free software gifts to help them oppress their | citizenry. Logically, there didn't have to be a North Korean | Linux (which there is.) | | Such licenses wouldn't extend any rights to citizens of rogue | countries, or to non-citizens while in such countries, nor | entities (including companies) with control or ownership ties | to rogue countries, or, say, countries which jail or execute | LGBTQ. (At the very least, we don't have to extend a license | without payment and contracts.) There are risks to friendly- | nation or no-rogue-nation licenses, granted; but there are | nasty consequences to handing more and sharper knives every | year to rogue countries, too. | | Whether one likes it or not, an executive order from Biden | could perhaps make that happen tomorrow. | spijdar wrote: | This idea has been strongly rejected by the FSF/GNU group. | Now, they don't have magical sovereignty over the word "open | source", but as commonly used, especially in "these parts of | the woods", most people will think of Open Source == FOSS, | which with no uncertainty _intentionally_ allows bad people | to use it. This is one of the things that has gotten RMS in | hot water, and when push comes to shove is a pretty unpopular | opinion, but is deeply embedded in the GNU GPL and BSD sense | of "open source". | | There _are_ multiple "don't be evil" licenses, with varying | types of stipulations. Some literally say "don't be evil". | There was one license that made the rounds here on HN a while | back that said something to the effect of "you must accept | the authority of the Christian Bible". These are | controversial at best, and disliked in part because they're | often extremely vague, and very questionably enforceable. | | Trying to spell out the specific moral or legal stipulations | that would prevent one from using software is ... more doable | from a legal perspective, but still opposed by FSF/GNU types, | because it feels contrarian to the free software movement, | and a general distrust for governments and government | regulations. Taking people's software freedom away because of | where they're born rubs some people the wrong way. | | Not sure exactly how I feel about the issue as a whole, I | don't buy wholesale into Stallman's ideology, but it's | something worth considering. | dralley wrote: | Seems rather pointless since it would be totally | unenforcable. As if North Korea, the #1 producer of | counterfeit US currency worldwide, is going to respect IP | rights. Likewise with Russia and China. | | The same logic applies to the US too, by the way. I don't | think the NSA thought too hard about e.g. whether backdooring | Cisco routers was in violation of any IP laws - I doubt | they'd care much about the contents of LICENSE.txt. Complete | exercise in futility. | Nomentatus wrote: | Much more enforceable than you'd think, since trade | treaties don't allow countries to widely violate licenses. | Not to mention that products can't be shipped from rogue | countries to the rest of the world with such software, say | an embedded OS. What doesn't have a chip in it, now? | realityking wrote: | How many treaties like this is North Korea a signatory | of? And if they are a member of any, how much do they | care about breaching them considering they're already | under comprehensive sanctions? | Nomentatus wrote: | Russia, China, Iran - all still rely heavily on | international trade treaties. North Korea not so much, | true. | [deleted] | oneplane wrote: | I might be completely missing something here, but I don't seem to | spot any relation to the OpenBMC software payload that is | currently available for certain existing BMCs. Perhaps they are | not looking to integrate the two, but it would seem like a lot of | duplicate work if you create new hardware but then not use | existing open software to power it (aside from the FPGA bitstream | of course). | codys wrote: | The press release notes that they expect to run the OpenBMC | software on this LibreBMC hardware | oneplane wrote: | Ah yes, I see it now, right at the end of the page (and it's | even in the tags). I think I got too excited and immediately | started tabbing to their hardware repos for the two FPGA | designs and that LiteX tooling before reading the last two | sentences. | pwdisswordfish8 wrote: | The OpenPOWER Foundation GitHub organization appears to be here, | but it doesn't look like there's a public repo for the | openpowerfoundation.org site that would allow submitting pull | requests to remove the hostile scrolling behavior on this page. | | https://github.com/OpenPOWERFoundation | | (Please do not upvote this comment.) | PostThisTooFast wrote: | There you go: The article defines BMC in the FIRST SENTENCE. | | That is how you do it. | marcodiego wrote: | Hope this is already influence of RedHat on IBM. | jhickok wrote: | IBM began this initiative in 2013. | oneplane wrote: | It seems mostly OCP-based, but it's possible that the choice | for POWER cores is indeed an IBM thing. On the other hand: it | doesn't matter as much since the design assumes swappable | management cards. | ilikejam wrote: | Probably entirely unrelated, but Sun T series (definitely T5xxx, | not sure about T1/2 series) ILOMs were Linux on PowerPC. Always | found that amusing. | rjsw wrote: | Sun Fire V20z (AMD Opteron) servers are the same. | spijdar wrote: | Technically unrelated, but it does beg the question of why | OpenPOWER and friends haven't used any of the embedded PPC | cores... | wmf wrote: | Before OpenPOWER, IBM Power servers used a PowerPC-based | don't-call-it-a-BMC. Either IBM decided not to release that | chip to the outside or maybe Google didn't want it. | detaro wrote: | Are there fully open ones? | sennight wrote: | It does, it is used for soft realtime related stuff (power, | fan, errorlog, etc). Throwing BMC related activities in there | is certainly doable, but it would complicated things to the | point where another chip would be tempting. | spijdar wrote: | I mean, the OCC and some of the other on-chip cores are | based on the 400 series cores, but what I mean is there | were/are tons of SoCs from NXP almost purpose built to | serve as BMC-style control chips, with reasonably powerful | cores and all the peripheral I/O it'd need. These were used | (AFAIK) in Sun servers, so I wonder why not in OpenPOWER. | | I'm guessing cost/availability is really what it boils down | to, since the ASRock chips are probably just that much | cheaper and better understood. | wmf wrote: | I imagine Google was already using ASPEED BMCs in their | x86 servers so they kept using it in OpenPOWER. There are | some really specific things like PECI and VGA redirection | that x86 BMCs need and AFAIK nothing besides ASPEED has | those features. | sennight wrote: | I doubt IBM gave Google any thought in this matter. I'm | pretty confident that it has a lot more to do with the | way IBM does their market segmentation, and how that is | related to hardware + software bundling and firmware. The | ARM BMC fits in a HMC shaped hole. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Hardware_Management_Con | sol... | eqvinox wrote: | All the existing embedded PPC cores are targeted at network | or storage applications; emulating a terminal / console / | graphics card needs a bit of a different arrangement (at | least if you want it to be compatible with some existing | stuff.) | surajs wrote: | wow this reminds me of metal gear solid for some reason ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-05-10 23:00 UTC)