Hey, it’s Bryan from Oxide, I’m back with another FAQ Friday. One of the frequently asked questions we’ve gotten is:
Hey, you keep saying you have no BMC, I keep hearing this. You have no baseboard management controller, but then I do hear that you have a service processor (an SP). Isn’t a service processor just another name for a baseboard management controller?
And the answer is yeah, a little bit, but it’s so architecturally different that we didn’t want to actually sully ourselves with the name BMC. And I gotta tell you, this is very personal for me. My initials are BMC, and growing up at Sun, the BMC was such a tire fire.
And I would see these bug synopsis that I get mailed about BMC causes panic. BMC causes outage. And I would have this fight or flight reaction because I think, god damnit, "is that me?" It’s like, no, it’s not me. It’s the baseboard management controller.
And that term has been very sullied by something that’s grossly mis-architected because it’s a computer within the computer. It is a multi-user operating system, often very down-rev. If you wanna know what are the most ancient Linux distributions that are out there, go to your BMC and see what version of Linux that thing is running. Way down-rev. Lots of vulnerabilities. Big multi-user system.
It often has DRAM associated with it. So when the BMC boots, it has to train its own DRAM before it can actually boot the host CPU and that it can train the actual DIMMs you care about.
All that is ridiculous. So we’ve wanted to avoid the stigma, the legitimate stigma of a BMC, by calling our microcontroller a service processor. And what it does is really trim down. It’s not a multi-user system that you can log into. It is a fit-for-purpose system with its own embedded operating system.
If you haven’t checked it out appropriately named Hubris. Thank you Cliff Biffle on the Oxide team for that terrific name. I did the debugger for hubris, which we aptly call humility. The microcontroller, which again is open source, that micro controller based operating system that is really fit-for-purpose.
It has things like environmentals, power control, power sequencing, a serial console, and that is about it. It is way trimmed down from that BMC.
So yes, our service processor is maybe, in some regards, the logical equivalent of a baseboard management controller, but it’s so architecturally different that we really had to give it another name because hey, names matter and BMC, it’s not me. When your BMC is causing you problems. It’s not Bryan McDowell Cantrill that’s doing it to you it’s a baseboard management controller. Thanks everyone.