[coreboot] ast2400 / ast2500

[Tirumalesh]

Hi,

Could some one please let me know, if corebott supports either AST2400/AST2500 (ASpeed BMC)
If yes, how to test it with QEMU?

Thanks for the help,
Tirumalesh.

[David Hendricks]

Post by Tirumalesh
Hi,
Could some one please let me know, if corebott supports either
AST2400/AST2500 (ASpeed BMC)
If yes, how to test it with QEMU?

What kind of support are you looking for? There is some support for
interfacing with it in coreboot running on the host:
https://review.coreboot.org/cgit/coreboot.git/tree/src/drivers/aspeed

I believe this was added as part of the Asus KGPE-D16 OpenBMC porting
effort: https://www.raptorengineering.com/coreboot/kgpe-d16-
bmc-port-status.php

[Timothy Pearson]

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Post by Tirumalesh
Hi,
Could some one please let me know, if corebott supports either
AST2400/AST2500 (ASpeed BMC)
If yes, how to test it with QEMU?
What kind of support are you looking for? There is some support for
interfacing with it in coreboot running on the
host: https://review.coreboot.org/cgit/coreboot.git/tree/src/drivers/aspeed
<https://review.coreboot.org/cgit/coreboot.git/tree/src/drivers/aspeed>
I believe this was added as part of the Asus KGPE-D16 OpenBMC porting
effort: https://www.raptorengineering.com/coreboot/kgpe-d16-bmc-port-status.php
<https://www.raptorengineering.com/coreboot/kgpe-d16-bmc-port-status.php>

While somewhat similar in terms of interfaces / functionality, that
board uses the AST2050 which is a much less powerful chip.

The AST2400 doesn't see much use on x86 coreboot-supported platforms as
far as I am aware; SuperMicro likes to use it but it doesn't look like
any of those boards are supported (there are no reports for any of those
boards in the board status repository [1]).

[1] https://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards

- --
Timothy Pearson
Raptor Engineering
[phone] (direct line)
[phone] (switchboard)
https://www.raptorengineering.com
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[Tirumalesh]

Thanks for the reply, it is somewhat strange though.

It means no server board runs fully with coreboot as firmware for both c86 and BMC.

If this is not the case, what kind of bmc is used by all the supported boards, all of them are using different firmware for bmc and x86?

Thanks,
Tirumalesh

[T***@gmx.com]

Post by Tirumalesh
Thanks for the reply, it is somewhat strange though.
It means no server board runs fully with coreboot as firmware for both c86 and BMC.
If this is not the case, what kind of bmc is used by all the supported boards, all of them are using different firmware for bmc and x86?

As tim said the KGPE-D16 and KCMA-D8 have a fully open source libre init
process on coreboot and support the libre OpenBMC for the AST BMC chip

There aren't any other coreboot boards that support a BMC, and the only
other device that has both fully open source firmware/init and an open
source BMC off the shelf is the TALOS 2.

Coreboot itself couldn't be ran on a BMC chip, well I suppose one could
port it but there really wouldn't be a point to that as that isn't what
it was designed for.


PS welcome to the list :D

[Tirumalesh]

Thanks for the information.

As I understand correctly, the main support is for x86 only. So if we want to run coreboot as the only firmware, we have to do it our self.

Thanks,
Tirumalesh

On 10/20/2017 03:04 PM, Tirumalesh wrote: > Thanks for the reply, it is somewhat strange though. > > It means no server board runs fully with coreboot as firmware for both c86 and BMC. > > If this is not the case, what kind of bmc is used by all the supported boards, all of them are using different firmware for bmc and x86? As tim said the KGPE-D16 and KCMA-D8 have a fully open source libre init process on coreboot and support the libre OpenBMC for the AST BMC chip There aren't any other coreboot boards that support a BMC, and the only other device that has both fully open source firmware/init and an open source BMC off the shelf is the TALOS 2. Coreboot itself couldn't be ran on a BMC chip, well I suppose one could port it but there really wouldn't be a point to that as that isn't what it was designed for. PS welcome to the list :D

[Alberto Bursi]

What's the point?

Coreboot is not supposed to be used as BMC firmware.

If you want open BMC firmware you need to look for OpenBMC project, that
supports Aspeed BMC chips and provides all features a BMC firmware
should provide. https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc

Post by Tirumalesh
Thanks for the information.
As I understand correctly, the main support is for x86 only. So if we
want to run coreboot as the only firmware, we have to do it our self.
Thanks,
Tirumalesh

On 10/20/2017 03:04 PM, Tirumalesh wrote: > Thanks for the reply, it
is somewhat strange though. > > It means no server board runs fully
with coreboot as firmware for both c86 and BMC. > > If this is not
the case, what kind of bmc is used by all the supported boards, all
of them are using different firmware for bmc and x86? As tim said the
KGPE-D16 and KCMA-D8 have a fully open source libre init process on
coreboot and support the libre OpenBMC for the AST BMC chip There
aren't any other coreboot boards that support a BMC, and the only
other device that has both fully open source firmware/init and an
open source BMC off the shelf is the TALOS 2. Coreboot itself
couldn't be ran on a BMC chip, well I suppose one could port it but
there really wouldn't be a point to that as that isn't what it was
designed for. PS welcome to the list :D

[Tirumalesh]

Using complete open source firmware is just one of the important advantages.

In my understanding coreboot provides lot more than that for a small team.

1. No drivers in firmware(leaving some basic things like spi etc)
2. A single image (firmware + Linux + rootfs)
3. The above means it’s very convenient for updates (major source of security bugs)
4. Using same firmware on x86 and bmc means, what ever infra we develop for board bring up and ops (as coreboot payload) works on both.
5. Same thing for secure booting.

Most of the time the above things are also very important.

Thanks,
Tirumalesh.

[Andrey Korolyov]

Post by Tirumalesh
4. Using same firmware on x86 and bmc means, what ever infra we develop for
board bring up and ops (as coreboot payload) works on both.
5. Same thing for secure booting.

While I borrow not much expertise there, these points are applicable
at this moment only if you are planning to run UEFI on both ARM and
x86 devices at once, all other things are pretty less generic and not
replaceable. UEFI is mentioned, but it could be u-boot or something
else which works as cross-platform bootloader and could be inserted
within a boot sequence stack on both IMC and host - on certain
hardware you would manage to get identical software stack on different
architectures for a small effort but for most times this is not true
and significant work needs to be done.

The second major point is a lack of host board signaling unification,
you would not even have a guarantee that same BMC-side GPIO pins are
responsible for same action types across boards of a single vendor
(true for generations of Supermicro removable BMCs), so each board or
board family would probably need additional work to create signaling
descriptions. I`m not sure if coreboot is an appropriate replacement
for OpenBMC efforts right there, as it was said before in this thread
because real positive outcome is barely imaginable from this
description.

[Alberto Bursi]

Post by Tirumalesh
Using complete open source firmware is just one of the important advantages.
In my understanding coreboot provides lot more than that for a small team.
1. No drivers in firmware(leaving some basic things like spi etc)
2. A single image (firmware + Linux + rootfs)
3. The above means it’s very convenient for updates (major source of
security bugs)
4. Using same firmware on x86 and bmc means, what ever infra we
develop for board bring up and ops (as coreboot payload) works on both.
5. Same thing for secure booting.
Most of the time the above things are also very important.
Thanks,
Tirumalesh.

Coreboot is hardware-specific, so the Coreboot that runs in the x86
system will be very different from the one running in the BMC. They will
have the same interfaces to boot a payload of course.

I'm not sure what kind of firmware you plan to deploy on both the x86
system and the BMC.

The BMC has a very weak ARM processor and not much onboard flash for
firmware. It is much better if you do 2 different payloads already.

Besides, on ARM systems the board bringup part (what Coreboot was born
for) is done by a bootROM (read-only memory inside the ARM SoC, you
can't do anything to this). Then it loads a bootloader from the device's
flash memory.
This bootloader then does some more initalization, and then that loads a
linux kernel written on raw flash or something like that and executes it.
From there the Linux kernel takes over.

For the AST2400 the bootloader is uboot, and the openbmc project has the
source to compile this part too so you can have a fully open system
https://github.com/openbmc/u-boot/commit/f03ebaa6c2aefc49c0fdd6bdca51c666ba52663a

-Alberto

[T***@gmx.com]

Post by Tirumalesh
Thanks for the information.
As I understand correctly, the main support is for x86 only. So if we want to run coreboot as the only firmware, we have to do it our self.

Coreboot supports ARM, which is the usual BMC processor of choice -
although as I have said you'd be much better off porting OpenBMC
(preferably the better IBM version for even more features) and having a
management stack ready to go vs having to make your own with coreboot
(this is the first time I have heard of that)

[Tirumalesh]

Thanks for the info.
We are not planning to use OpenBMC.

Will try to give coreboot a try, if not planning to bootstrap directly Linux.

Thanks,
Tirumalesh

[Tirumalesh]

I am trying to see if coreboot can be main firmware on bmc.

Does coreboot supports any BMC chips in general?

Thanks,
Tirumalesh

Post by Tirumalesh
Hi,
Could some one please let me know, if corebott supports either AST2400/AST2500 (ASpeed BMC)
If yes, how to test it with QEMU?

What kind of support are you looking for? There is some support for interfacing with it in coreboot running on the host: [https://review.coreboot.org/cgit/coreboot.git/tree/src/drivers/aspeed]("https://review.coreboot.org/cgit/coreboot.git/tree/src/drivers/aspeed")
I believe this was added as part of the Asus KGPE-D16 OpenBMC porting effort: [https://www.raptorengineering.com/coreboot/kgpe-d16-bmc-port-status.php]("https://www.raptorengineering.com/coreboot/kgpe-d16-bmc-port-status.php")