AMD is not ready for AGESA open firmware yet, but is still taking steps towards open source. Within the OpenBMC (Open Board Management Controller) project, the company is working on open firmware for the BMC controller for server management. Such a controller has its own CPU, memory, storage and interfaces to work with sensors. It allows to control power supply, firmware and disks, to load the server via network and so on. Supreeth Venkatesh from AMD told at the virtual Open Source Firmware Conference (OSFC 2020) about the work they do on OpenBMC. According to him, open source dominates the industry at the moment. However, he did not specify any details and plans in this regard. However, you can get something from the slides. Apparently, the development and testing were carried out on reference platforms of AMD servers. Taking into account that the project itself is supported by such giants as IBM, Intel, Google and Facebook, it is likely that it will « take off». Now OpenBMC supports AMD EPYC Ethanol and EPYC Daytona reference platforms. At the moment, in terms of functionality, it is said that work on remote debugging using OpenBMC, the kernel APML driver SB-RMI, the processor power management and RAS functionality. It also talks about compatibility with IPMI 2.0 and Redfish standards.
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