Having been somewhat involved in OpenPOWER firmware, I have a bunch of experience and opinions on maintaining firmware trees for products, what working with upstream looks like and all that.
So, with my new Blackbird system I decided to take a bit of a look as to what the firmware situation was like.
There’s two main parts of firmware: BMC and Host. The BMC firmware runs purely on the ASPEED AST2500 and is based on OpenBMC while the host firmware is what runs on the POWER9 and is based off of OpenPOWER Firmware as assembled by op-build.
Initial impressions on the BMC is that there doesn’t seem to be any web based UI for it, which is kind of disappointing, as the Web UI being developed upstream has some nice qualities, and I’d say I even enjoyed using it when it was built into BMC firmware for systems we had when I was at IBM.
Looking at the git trees, the raptor-v1.00 tag is OpenBMC 2.7.0-dev-533-g386e5602e while current master is 2.8.0-dev-960-g10f7830bd. The spot where it split off was 2.7.0-dev-430-g7443ee80b, from April 2019 – so it’s not too old, but I’m also not convinced there should have been some security patches since then.
I’m not sure if any of the OpenBMC code is upstream, I haven’t looked.
Unfortunately, none of the host firmware is upstream.
On the host firmware side, v2.3-rc2-67-ga6a5f142 is the Raptor tag, and that compares with current master of v2.4-305-g54d8daf4, the place where Raptor forked was v2.3-rc2-9-g7b556015, again in April of 2019. Considering there was an upstream release in May of 2019 (v2.3), and again in July (v2.4), it could have easily have made it into an upstream release.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to have been an upstream op-build release since v2.4 back in July (when I made it shortly before leaving IBM).
The skiboot component of host firmware has had an upstream release since I left (v6.5 in mid-August 2019), so the (rather trivial) platform support could have easily made it. I have a cleaned up and ready to upstream patch for it, I just need some DIMMs to actually test with before I send the patch.
As the current firmware situation stands, producing another build with updated upstream code is tricky due to the out-of-tree nature of the Blackbird patches, and a straight “git merge” is probably doable by some people, but not everybody.
On my TODO list is to get all the code into a state I can upstream it, assess vulnerability to CVE-2019-6260, and work out how I want to make it do Secure Boot (something that isn’t in upstream firmware yet, and currently would require a TPM, which I do not have).