# Tales from Firmware Camp

DevFeed: [Tales from Firmware Camp](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/tales-from-firmware-camp-35197.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/tales-from-firmware-camp/>)

Published: 2019-09-10T15:09:26Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Jessie Frazelle](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/jessie-frazelle.md>)

Topics: [coreboot](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/coreboot.md>), [Embedded Software Dev](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/embedded-software-dev.md>), [Open Source](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/open-source.md>), [Raspberry Pi](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/raspberry-pi.md>), [Linux](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/linux.md>), [Linux Kernel](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/linux-kernel.md>)

Tags: [coreboot](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/coreboot.md>), [cpu](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cpu.md>), [dhcp](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/dhcp.md>), [firmware](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/firmware.md>), [hackathon](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hackathon.md>), [interface](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/interface.md>), [linux](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/linux.md>), [open-source](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/open-source.md>), [spi](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/spi.md>)

## AI overview

A personal account of an Open Source Firmware Conference hackathon, where the author worked on running Coreboot and OpenBMC on a Supermicro X10SLM-F board. The team inspected and flashed BMC firmware using SPI tools, configured network access through IPMI and dnsmasq, and investigated support for the board's ASPEED 2400 BMC.

## Source excerpt

Last week I attended the Open Source Firmware Conference. It was amazing! The talks, people, and overall feel of the conference really left me feeling inspired and lucky to attend. Having been pushed to attend vendor conferences and trade shows through my career for various jobs, it was so refreshing to have the chance to hang out with folks from such a genuine community that really just want to help one another. When the talks hit YouTube you should be sure to check them out (I also tweeted about a few of them). What I will focus on in this post was the last two days of the conference that were devoted to the hackathon. I had bought a X10SLM-F Supermicro board off of eBay a few months ago that I wanted to run CoreBoot on. If you are interested in finding a board that will work with CoreBoot, you should check its status on the status page. I had been talking to Zaolin about wanting a board to hack on and he recommended this one. At the hackathon, we decided to start with the BMC instead of the CPU BIOS. This made for some fun problems and definitely a lot of lessons learned. I had a Dediprog SF100 flash programmer I brought to the hackathon as well. Some people use RaspberryPis as their flash programmer but the Dediprog was recommended to me and definitely came in handy. However, if you want a cheaper alternative there are a bunch of ways you can skin that cat. To get started, we read the original binary off the SPI flash... this worked fairly simply. We used the opensource dpcmd tool from dediprog to do it. But you could also use flashrom. While inspecting the original binary, we found the string linux a few times... as well as a MAC adress, boot commands, IP address, and some other interesting strings. Before flashing on new firmware we also made sure the board actually booted the BMC. We didn't have access to any console so we made due with an IPMI LAN port and dnsmasq to work with DHCP. It worked and we got into the BMC user interface over the web. If you've ever us