Aspeed family boards (*-bmc, ast2500-evb, ast2600-evb)

The QEMU Aspeed machines model BMCs of various OpenPOWER systems and Aspeed evaluation boards. They are based on different releases of the Aspeed SoC : the AST2400 integrating an ARM926EJ-S CPU (400MHz), the AST2500 with an ARM1176JZS CPU (800MHz) and more recently the AST2600 with dual cores ARM Cortex A7 CPUs (1.2GHz).

The SoC comes with RAM, Gigabit ethernet, USB, SD/MMC, USB, SPI, I2C, etc.

AST2400 SoC based machines :

  • palmetto-bmc OpenPOWER Palmetto POWER8 BMC

AST2500 SoC based machines :

  • ast2500-evb Aspeed AST2500 Evaluation board
  • romulus-bmc OpenPOWER Romulus POWER9 BMC
  • witherspoon-bmc OpenPOWER Witherspoon POWER9 BMC
  • sonorapass-bmc OCP SonoraPass BMC
  • swift-bmc OpenPOWER Swift BMC POWER9

AST2600 SoC based machines :

  • ast2600-evb Aspeed AST2600 Evaluation board (Cortex A7)
  • tacoma-bmc OpenPOWER Witherspoon POWER9 AST2600 BMC

Supported devices

  • SMP (for the AST2600 Cortex-A7)
  • Interrupt Controller (VIC)
  • Timer Controller
  • RTC Controller
  • I2C Controller
  • System Control Unit (SCU)
  • SRAM mapping
  • X-DMA Controller (basic interface)
  • Static Memory Controller (SMC or FMC) - Only SPI Flash support
  • SPI Memory Controller
  • USB 2.0 Controller
  • SD/MMC storage controllers
  • SDRAM controller (dummy interface for basic settings and training)
  • Watchdog Controller
  • GPIO Controller (Master only)
  • UART
  • Ethernet controllers
  • Front LEDs (PCA9552 on I2C bus)
  • LPC Peripheral Controller (a subset of subdevices are supported)
  • Hash/Crypto Engine (HACE) - Hash support only. TODO: HMAC and RSA

Missing devices

  • Coprocessor support
  • ADC (out of tree implementation)
  • PWM and Fan Controller
  • Slave GPIO Controller
  • Super I/O Controller
  • PCI-Express 1 Controller
  • Graphic Display Controller
  • PECI Controller
  • MCTP Controller
  • Mailbox Controller
  • Virtual UART
  • eSPI Controller
  • I3C Controller

Boot options

The Aspeed machines can be started using the -kernel option to load a Linux kernel or from a firmware. Images can be downloaded from the OpenBMC jenkins :

or directly from the OpenBMC GitHub release repository :

The image should be attached as an MTD drive. Run :

$ qemu-system-arm -M romulus-bmc -nic user \
      -drive file=obmc-phosphor-image-romulus.static.mtd,format=raw,if=mtd -nographic

Options specific to Aspeed machines are :

  • execute-in-place which emulates the boot from the CE0 flash device by using the FMC controller to load the instructions, and not simply from RAM. This takes a little longer.
  • fmc-model to change the FMC Flash model. FW needs support for the chip model to boot.
  • spi-model to change the SPI Flash model.

For instance, to start the ast2500-evb machine with a different FMC chip and a bigger (64M) SPI chip, use :

-M ast2500-evb,fmc-model=mx25l25635e,spi-model=mx66u51235f