Even NVIDIA Has Jumped Big On The Open-Source OpenBMC Train

OpenBMC as the Linux Foundation project backed by vendors like Intel / Microsoft / Google / Meta for an open-source BMC firmware stack continues to be a growing success. This alternative to long-used proprietary BMC software stacks continues to grow in popularity with AMD now using it on their reference motherboards and Supermicro being another notable user with some of their server platforms. Not entirely new but been meaning to write about it and NVIDIA talked more openly about it this week: NVIDIA is also a big supporter and user of OpenBMC for their high-end AI/HPC servers and BlueField DPU hardware.

It's not a brand new phenomenon at NVIDIA but they too like other major hardware vendors have been increasing their investment around OpenBMC. This week at the Open-Source Firmware Conference (OSFC) in Germany, NVIDIA's Tom Joseph and Deepak Kodihalli talked about their work on adapting OpenBMC for NVIDIA platforms.

NVIDIA isn't just a user of OpenBMC but their engineers have been working to build upon it with offering greater hardware telemetry and adding other new capabilities. Where relevant they are also working to upstream their OpenBMC changes such as having contributed their work on the PLDM Type 5 (T5) stack, staged firmware updates, and other features.

The video recording and slides from the NVIDIA OpenBMC presentation at OSFC 2024 aren't yet available but I'll update it once they are published. Documentation and other details around the NVIDIA OpenBMC "NVBMC" software stack can be found on GitHub for those interested. It's great seeing NVIDIA not only using OpenBMC -- in going along with this pleasant industry trend -- but also investing in upstreaming their changes back into OpenBMC proper and also the extra step of publicly talking about their work on OpenBMC.