Tooling infrastructure for Platform Management Subsystem protocols

Platform Management Components Intercommunication (PMCI) Working Group defines standards to address “inside the box” communication interfaces between the components of the platform management subsystem. There are some specifications in PMCI that has gained the interest of the OpenBMC community for MC->MC, MC->Devices and MC->BIOS communication. A couple of such protocols are the Platform Management Data Model (PLDM) and the Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP). MCTP allows for a media independent communications protocol between hardware components. PLDM defines data models and messages for communications related to discovery, sensors, FRUs, monitoring and control, etc, between management controllers and devices. PLDM over MCTP is an alternative over the old standard IPMI over KCS and IPMI over BT.IPMI has a number of open source tools like ipmitool, freeipmi etc. There is no open source tool for PMCI protocols.

This talk will describe the effort for building tooling for PMCI protocols like PLDM,NVMe etc. "pldmtool" is being developed as a requester targeting the PLDM/MCTP stack on OpenBMC. The progress of the development will be described. pldmtool can also be used to target other management controllers implementing pldm. The talk will explain the plans to extend this to support other PMCI protocols like NVMe. The goal is to develop this as a generic reference implementation and share it with the wider firmware community. The talk will cover the proposal to adapt the PMCI tooling infrastructure into a compliance suite.