Re: Support for Asus IPMI Card

[Andrew Jeffery <andrew@codeconstruct.com.au>]

On Sun, 2026-01-11 at 20:13 -0600, Anirudh Srinivasan wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
> 
> Thanks for your response.
> 
> On Sun, Jan 11, 2026 at 6:25 PM Andrew Jeffery
> <andrew@codeconstruct.com.au> wrote:
> 
> > I'd be surprised. 100M mode might indicate an NC-SI configuration.
> 
> Yeah not sure what's going on here. On the vendor fw, I see a usb0 nic
> on the host and the aspeed, but I don't see it on my openbmc (with
> this 100M phy disabled). Maybe something worth trying to enable.

Some platforms, such as GB200NVL, use the ECM USB gadget for ethernet
to the host. In that case a shell script[1] is paired with a systemd
network unit[2] for setting up the interface:

[1]: https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc/blob/ad8d54b743b6118f406010d72bf76d3fcb13d2e9/meta-nvidia/recipes-nvidia/usb-ethernet-init/files/usb-ethernet-init.sh
[2]: https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc/blob/ad8d54b743b6118f406010d72bf76d3fcb13d2e9/meta-nvidia/recipes-nvidia/usb-ethernet-init/files/01-bmc-usb0.network

> > 
> > Possibly this is a result of not enabling the devices discussed above
> > (along with the necessary PCIe bridge settings).
> 
> I should clarify, these errors (on the host) are from the vendor fw,
> not from openbmc.

Ack.

> 
> > > Some searching online [5] shows that this functionality might only
> > > work for certain Asus motherboards with a BIOS that specifically
> > > supports this functionality.  The vendor DT has a special
> > > bmc_dev@1e7e0000 of type "aspeed,ast2600-bmc-device". This doesn't
> > > seem to be supported upstream.
> > >  I see it in Aspeed's kernel fork on
> > > github [6]. I am guessing this is what provides the pcie ipmi device.
> > 
> > One of the important bits there is enabling
> > SCU_PCIE_CONF_BMC_DEV_EN_E2L, which exposes the LPC peripherals such as
> > KCS and UARTs over PCIe. I expect that will help with the ipmi_si
> > errors above.
> > 
> > Note that these can also be enabled on the VGA device though there's
> > probably a question of whether the pieces are in place on the host-side
> > to support that.
> 
> Since the ipmi device is failing to probe (on the host) even on the
> vendor fw, I don't have hopes of getting it working easily on openbmc.
> I will try your suggestions and report back if I have any luck.
> 
> If this device just requires a custom bios on the host to expose some
> additional info over pcie (and doesn't require the BMC header
> connection), maybe passing the card through to a VM with a custom edk2
> build might make it work. But this seems like a bit of a long shot.

Yep, seems a bit much at this point.

Andrew