Group: Hardware/Computers/BMC/Talos II

Introduction

This page will have information about the BMC used in the Talos II (and maybe the Talos II Lite as well).

Specifications

		Comments
System on a chip	Aspeed AST2500 BMC
CPU	ARMv6.	We have no FSDG distributions officially supporting ARMv6, though: LibreCMC supports only ARMv7 (cortex A9). So it might be necessary to look if OpenWRT has armv6 support, and to add the BMC to LibreCMC. Guix has an ARMv6 toolchain (to build some free Raspberry Pi bootloaders), though due to the lack of GNU/Linux ARMv6 support (adding it would be time consuming) and minimum rootfs size (in the order of GiB), it could probably only be used to build a minimal firmware or kernel+initramfs.
RAM	? Can usually be deduced from the device tree.
Storage	? Can usually be deduced from firmware updates.

Issue

The main issue is that while all the hardware works with free software, there is no FSDG compliant distribution for the BMC.

There might be a way to fix that either by adding support for the BMC in small distributions like LibreCMC or ProteanOS or by writing a small firmware that just boot the main computer without exposing any BMC features.

There is also some documentation about using the FPGA as BMC. This also explains exactly how to deactivate the BMC once booted. So it might be possible to do very basic initialization in one way or another and just deactivate it when done.