[HN Gopher] OpenPOWER Foundation announces LibreBMC, a POWER-bas...
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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
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