OpenPOWER Foundation to showcase LibreBMC, a fully open-source POWER-based BMC at OCP Global Summit

SAN JOSE, CA — Oct. 18, 2022  — OpenPOWER Foundation, an open developer community for the POWER ISA, will demonstrate a full demo of LibreBMC, an open source baseboard management controller (BMC) solution at the 2022 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit. This follows on from the project’s announcement at last year's OCP Global Summit. 

BMCs enable remote monitoring and access to servers. They underpin the ability for hyperscalers and enterprise data centers to efficiently manage their fleet of servers safely and securely. Historically, BMCs are built using legacy proprietary and closed architectures.

The OpenPOWER Foundation is pleased to showcase a full demo of the LibreBMC project, a BMC solution with a completely open source stack of hardware, software, specifications, and tooling. The solution as shown uses a processor called Microwatt, a community developed softcore based on the fully open POWER ISA.  It runs the OpenBMC firmware, a Linux Foundation project, and the platform adheres to the Open Compute Project’s DC-SCM specification. LibreBMC was built using open-source tooling and with open source peripheral IP such as  LiteX.

LibreBMC is an open-source community project guided by the OPF Special Integration Group of the same name.  The project details, including links to all source code and documentation, can be found here.   It also has inspired Axiado Corporation, an AI-enhanced hardware security company, and new OpenPOWER Foundation Silver member, to develop their own datacenter-ready secure control module (DC-SCM), Smart SCM solution, utilizing both the POWER ISA and OpenBMC firmware. Axiado will also be demoing their solution at the OpenPOWER booth.

Axiado’s President and CEO Gopi Sirineni added, “This is an important milestone for Axiado as it highlights our commitment to the Foundation and greater technical collaboration. Open ecosystem design has empowered start-ups such as Axiado to innovate with next generation capabilities previously not possible. Our demonstration illustrates what’s possible with open collaboration and how our Smart SCM, powered by TCU, can be used to enhance server security.”

“The community-driven LibreBMC solution demonstrates the kind and pace of innovation that occurs when open collaboration is placed front and center,” said James Kulina, executive director, OpenPOWER Foundation. “LibreBMC proves that for a critical infrastructure component such as the baseboard management controller, an open platform supported by an active community enables improved performance, reliability, customization, and security.”

Bijan Nowroozi, Chief Technology Officer for the Open Compute Project Foundation, said "Speaking on behalf of the OCP Community, we are excited to see the progress of OpenPOWER’s LibreBMC project, which utilizes OCP's DC-SCM standard that provides a wonderful open interface for platform resilience, management and orchestration capability, and enables OpenPOWER’s LibreBMC, to increase security and transparency for a next level BMC that supports POWER, ARM and x86 based systems.''

If you have any questions or feedback, you can also join our Slack workspace, or find us on Twitter at @openpowerorg!

About the OpenPOWER Foundation:

The OpenPOWER Foundation is the open steward for the open-source POWER ISA microprocessor architecture. The Foundation has 350+ members across software, hardware, and systems developing advanced microprocessors, servers, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, cloud, edge, and HPC data centers.

About Axiado

Axiado Corporation is a security processor company redefining hardware root of trust with hardware-based security technologies, including trusted control/compute unit (TCU) processor with a per-system AI. With its Zero-Trust Secure Vault™ boot and authentication core and Secure AI™ engines, the TCU eliminates breaches at the perimeter of existing cloud infrastructures, 5G base stations, networks, and IoT devices. Company was founded in San José, California, in 2017 with a mission to protect the users of everyday technologies from digital threats. For more information about Axiado, please visit axiado.com or follow @AxiadoCorp.

About Open Compute Project

The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) was initiated by Facebook in 2011 with a mission to apply the benefits of open source and open collaboration to hardware and rapidly increase the pace of innovation in, near and around the data center’s networking equipment, general purpose and GPU servers, storage devices and appliances, and scalable rack designs. OCP’s collaboration model is being applied beyond the data center, helping to advance the telecom industry & EDGE infrastructure.