Nuvoton iBMC boards (npcm750-evb, quanta-gsj)

The Nuvoton iBMC chips (NPCM7xx) are a family of ARM-based SoCs that are designed to be used as Baseboard Management Controllers (BMCs) in various servers. They all feature one or two ARM Cortex A9 CPU cores, as well as an assortment of peripherals targeted for either Enterprise or Data Center / Hyperscale applications. The former is a superset of the latter, so NPCM750 has all the peripherals of NPCM730 and more.

The NPCM750 SoC has two Cortex A9 cores and is targeted for the Enterprise segment. The following machines are based on this chip :

  • npcm750-evb Nuvoton NPCM750 Evaluation board

The NPCM730 SoC has two Cortex A9 cores and is targeted for Data Center and Hyperscale applications. The following machines are based on this chip :

  • quanta-gsj Quanta GSJ server BMC

There are also two more SoCs, NPCM710 and NPCM705, which are single-core variants of NPCM750 and NPCM730, respectively. These are currently not supported by QEMU.

Supported devices

  • SMP (Dual Core Cortex-A9)
  • Cortex-A9MPCore built-in peripherals: SCU, GIC, Global Timer, Private Timer and Watchdog.
  • SRAM, ROM and DRAM mappings
  • System Global Control Registers (GCR)
  • Clock and reset controller (CLK)
  • Timer controller (TIM)
  • Serial ports (16550-based)
  • DDR4 memory controller (dummy interface indicating memory training is done)
  • OTP controllers (no protection features)
  • Flash Interface Unit (FIU; no protection features)
  • Random Number Generator (RNG)
  • USB host (USBH)
  • GPIO controller
  • Analog to Digital Converter (ADC)
  • Pulse Width Modulation (PWM)
  • SMBus controller (SMBF)
  • Ethernet controller (EMC)
  • Tachometer

Missing devices

  • LPC/eSPI host-to-BMC interface, including
    • Keyboard and mouse controller interface (KBCI)
    • Keyboard Controller Style (KCS) channels
    • BIOS POST code FIFO
    • System Wake-up Control (SWC)
    • Shared memory (SHM)
    • eSPI slave interface
  • Ethernet controller (GMAC)
  • USB device (USBD)
  • Peripheral SPI controller (PSPI)
  • SD/MMC host
  • PECI interface
  • PCI and PCIe root complex and bridges
  • VDM and MCTP support
  • Serial I/O expansion
  • LPC/eSPI host
  • Coprocessor
  • Graphics
  • Video capture
  • Encoding compression engine
  • Security features

Boot options

The Nuvoton machines can boot from an OpenBMC firmware image, or directly into a kernel using the -kernel option. OpenBMC images for quanta-gsj and possibly others can be downloaded from the OpenPOWER jenkins :

The firmware image should be attached as an MTD drive. Example :

$ qemu-system-arm -machine quanta-gsj -nographic \
    -drive file=image-bmc,if=mtd,bus=0,unit=0,format=raw

The default root password for test images is usually 0penBmc.