Topic: openbmc

We have just released version 2.6.1 of the mctp utilities - the first stable point-release for the project.

Version 2.6 was the first to support running with restricted privileges, and has been integrated into meta-openembedded's "blacksail" release; with OE as a primary consumer of the mctp tools, a stable release gives us a method of providing a set of fixes, without potentially-disruptive feature changes that may come with integrating a major release.

We recently built a fully open source Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) implementation, right down to the hardware, and used it to boot and manage an IBM POWER9 AC922 ("witherspoon") server. The AC922 platform is the compute component of the Summit and Sierra supercomputers, the two fastest worldwide until mid-2020.

This work was conducted in conjunction with the OpenPOWER foundation, as part of their libreBMC project, and builds on a lot of prior work from IBM and Antmicro.