Hybrid Booting with Incremental Hibernation for the Baseboard Management Controllers

Abstract

The Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) is a specialized processor installed on the motherboard of a server. The BMC operates independently from the server and provides administrators with functionalities for managing the server. Since the server boots immediately after the BMC is powered on, it is crucial to ensure rapid booting and backup of the BMC in case of failures like power outages or system crashes. This paper proposes a hybrid booting with the incremental hibernation technique, considering the operating environment of the BMC. The proposed technique periodically stores the state of the BMC and offers various recovery options based on the stored state. It also employs an incremental backup technique for the efficient management of stored states and a hybrid booting technique to guarantee fast booting. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed technique, the proposed technique is implemented on a development board where the BMC chipset operates, and the overhead, disk usage, and booting speed are measured. The experimental results show that the proposed technique efficiently enables BMC backup and reduces the booting times.