The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel will begin upstreaming hardware enablement for the ASPEED AST2700 as the next-gen baseboard management controller “BMC” that will likely appear in the majority of future generation servers.
It’s already been six years since the AST2600 support began hitting the upstream Linux kernel and now preparations are getting underway for its successor with the AST2700 BMC. ASPEED began showing off the next-gen AST2700 earlier in the year but it’s not expected to begin appearing in production servers still for some months at least.
Submitted today for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window in early October was this pull request for the SoC tree of early ASPEED changes/ Most notable there is adding initial identification support in the ASPEED SoC info driver for the AST2700, AST2720, and AST2750 silicon IDs.
More changes are needed for the ASPEED AST2700 series support to be fully upstreamed for the likes of OpenBMC and other usage but at least the upstreaming dance has begun. The ASPEED AST2700 is the company’s 8th generation server management process and the first to use a 12nm process. The AST2700 is built around four ARM Cortex-A35 cores and two ARM Cortex-M4 cores. AST2700 will support Caliptra for a silicon root-of-trust backed by the Open Compute Project as well as bring other new capabilities over the AST2500 and AST2600 BMCs.
