Reverse engineering Dell iDRAC to get rid of GPU throttling

Re:Reverse engineering Dell iDRAC to get rid of GPU throttling by theideaofcoffee on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @03:40PM (#35892454)

They’re special firmware blobs because generally the OEMs aren’t building their BMCs from scratch as they might with their main boards and other components. They’re generally getting the bmc SoC from the likes of Aspeed and others who are the ones keeping them closed up. I’ve tried to get the magic binaries and source but there are so many layers of NDAs and sales gatekeepers. I’m not entirely sure who makes the dell bmcs but I know supermicro bundles Aspeed (at least they did with older generations of their main boards.)

I agree with you that you should be able to run whatever since in the end it’s just another computer, but the manufacturers believe otherwise since there’s “valuable IP” or whatever (insert rollseyes emoji here).

There are open specs like redfish but still doesn’t get to the heart of the matter.

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Re:Reverse engineering Dell iDRAC to get rid of GPU throttling by jebr224 on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @07:04PM (#35894685)

It is complicated.

AMI sells a bmc software stack, https://www.ami.com/megarac/ Intel and small manufacturer were unhappy, about always paying the ami tax. So intel created openbmc, as a hedge against ami's monopoly for small manufacturers. I have heard Openbmc has user from facebook, google, ibm, bytdance, and ali.

Dell owns their own stack in idrac, I have heard most of their systems are nuvoton based. I am suspect dell pays some big bucks to keep their systems at feature parity with the other options, and they view it as a an investment.

There are also silicon devices on the motherboard, that have drivers that are not able to be shared. So it not surprising that companies don't share source in a way that would be useful.

If you wanted a system that as a bmc that could be tested try the asrock-e3c246d4c, it looks like there are hobbyist, that have it running coreboot, and openbmc. (impressively)

https://9esec.io/blog/coreboot-on-the-asrock-e3c246d4c/

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Re:Reverse engineering Dell iDRAC to get rid of GPU throttling by mkj on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @11:02PM (#35896819)

Aspeed aren't the ones keeping them closed - OpenBMC running on Aspeed chips is an option chosen by some system vendors. It's a vendor choice whether to go with an open platform or a closed BMC from AMI etc.

https://github.com/AspeedTech-BMC/openbmc (or see the upstream OpenBMC tree)

HPE are adding some OpenBMC support https://www.hpe.com/us/en/compute/openbmc-proliant-servers.h...

This work from Supermicro looked promising https://lore.kernel.org/openbmc/CACPK8XdE0sRmt4x54YJVJO2wDT5...

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