OpenBMC


The OpenBMC project is a Linux Foundation collaborative open-source project whose goal is to produce an open source implementation of the Baseboard Management Controllers Firmware Stack. OpenBMC is a Linux distribution for BMCs meant to work across heterogeneous systems that include enterprise, high-performance computing, telecommunications, and cloud-scale data centers.

History

In 2014, four Facebook programmers at a Facebook hackathon event created a prototype open-source BMC firmware stack named OpenBMC. In 2015, IBM collaborated with Rackspace 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, Intel, IBM, Google, 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 joined as the 6th member of the OpenBMC technical steering committee.

Features

OpenBMC uses the Yocto Project as the underlying building and distribution generation framework. OpenBMC uses D-Bus as an inter-process communication. OpenBMC includes a web application for interacting with the firmware stack. OpenBMC added Redfish support for hardware management.

Systems

; Google/Rackspace partnership
; IBM
; Raptor Computing Systems / Raptor Engineering

u-bmc

u-bmc is a project which is developed parallel to OpenBMC but uses gRPC instead of IPMI.