Monitoring and Control Functions, Ipmb

5.1Monitoring and Control Functions

The IPMI System Monitor has a dedicated serial interface to the host processor on the cPB4612. It is a 16550-compatible UART that is configurable in SETUP. If this interface is not required, it can be disabled. Otherwise, it will be given a unique serial port address and interrupt. Note that the interrupt cannot coincide with the other COM ports; it is not shareable.

The serial interface is fixed at 9600 baud, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, no parity, full duplex. It complies with IPMI serial “basic” mode, as detailed in IPMI Spec 1.5, section 13.4, which permits IPMB packets to be transmitted and received using framing bytes and escape sequences. The packet structure otherwise is identical to the IPMB:

Figure 5.1: Packet Structure

Because the serial interface in this case is dedicated, the responder address and requester address bytes can be anything. The IPMI System Monitor, though, will always put its actual IPMB slave address in the rsAddr field of a response packet.

The IPMI 1.5 specification defines a basic mode serial port as a single session interface, since there is no session ID in the packet. This IPMI System Monitor, at this time, does not support Get Session Challenge and Activate Session commands, because the serial interface is dedicated to the IPMI system monitor, and the interface is always “up.”

5.2IPMB

The IPMB is an I2C→ interface that is routed through the backplane and connects to the BMC in the chassis to allow discovery of the IPMI System Monitor. Its operation is covered in the IPMI specification. It is always active.

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