From: Dong Wei <Dong.Wei@arm.com>
Sent: Monday, February 14, 2022 3:14 PM
To: Joakim Bech <joakim.bech@linaro.org>; open-ldcg-discussion@op-lists.linaro.org; Samer El-Haj-Mahmoud <Samer.El-Haj-Mahmoud@arm.com>; Gilbert Chen <Gilbert.Chen@arm.com>; Jeff Booher-Kaeding <Jeff.Booher-Kaeding@arm.com>
Subject: Re: OpenBMC information gathering

As discussed at the LDCG SC meeting in January, let's start a thread about OpenBMC where we will try to understand if we should look into OpenBMC and what the areas potentially could be. To get the discussion started I'm starting the thread by asking a couple of questions. Don't feel obliged to answer all of them. Pick the ones that are relevant for you. My goal is to make a summary of the tread and bring it up for discussion again at a future SC meeting.

1. Arm support

- Are there gaps in the Arm side of OpenBMC? What are those gaps?

[Gilbert] As far as I know, the gap of Arm server compared to x86 server is Host Interface and Host Power/Reset Control.  For Arm Server, there is no common hardware design, so OpenBMC needs different porting for different Arm servers.

- SBMR specification [1], what compliance levels to target? M1/M2 is one somewhat good shape?

2. Upstreaming

- Are there sufficient upstreaming efforts for the Arm architectures?

3. Developer support

- Is source code available to developers (open source? proprietary?)?

-- SCP / MCP are not necessarily open source from vendors.

-- Arm's reference code is open source.

[Gilbert] I am using zephyr(https://www.zephyrproject.org) to prototype the FW of SatMC FW(SatMC in SBMR should equivalent to MCP) and using Arduino Due instead of real MCP.

- Do we have the necessary hardware to be able to do development? What hardware? How can developers get hold of it?

[Gilbert] I am using AST2600 evaluation board for my OpenBMC development(http://www.aspeedtech.com/server_ast2600/). I purchased the board from Aspeed directly. Aspeed is one of the most widely used BMC SoC currently.

- Are specifications available to developers?

- What debugging capabilities exist for developers?

4. Testing

- What kind of testing do we have for OpenBMC?

[Gilbert] There is a repo for OpenBMC test automation( https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc-test-automation). It is based on Robot framework to run test cases through BMC network interface to verify different OpenBMC features.

- Is the testing sufficient?

- Does it require hardware or can we do testing using emulation or similar?

[Gilbert] OpenBMC support running on QEMU (https://github.com/openbmc/docs/blob/master/development/dev-environment.md). So the openbmc test automation should be able to talk to QEMU instead real hardware to run its test cases.

5. Security

- Cloud Security Industry Summit published a report [2] (A Case for a Trustworthy BMC) where they list gaps in OpenBMC when it comes to security. Anything in that report that we should pay attention to?

6. Anything else?

[1] https://documentation-service.arm.com/static/5fb7e810ca04df4095c1d658

[2] https://cloudsecurityindustrysummit.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/a-case-for-a-trustworthy-bmc.pdf

A kind reminder that this is a public and open list.

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