The Taiwanese company Asrock Rack produces the X570D4U server board, which costs around 430 euros and can be used to combine a Ryzen 5000 with up to 128 GB of DDR4 ECC RAM. The Aspeed AST2500 with proprietary firmware is used as a remote maintenance chip (Baseboard Management Controller, BMC) and as a graphics chip. Dutch programmer Renze Nicolai is working on an open source alternative to this BMC firmware. He has submitted several Linux kernel patches to use the Aspeed AST2500 on the X570D4U with OpenBMC.
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In order for the AST2500 to work properly with the mainboard, the OpenBMC firmware needs one customized Device Tree Source (DTS)which describes, for example, the connection of the GPIO connections of the AST2500 with signals from the chipset and CPU.
OpenBMC not only provides remote maintenance functions of IPMI 2.0, but also of Redfish.
The AST2500 successor AST2600 sits on many younger server boards, which has significantly stronger ARM cores and the I3C interface, which is necessary for DDR5 memory modules.
(ciw)