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. In the event of a power outage or system failure causing server downtime, administrators should promptly access the server remotely to identify the cause and take necessary actions. To facilitate this, fast BMC booting is crucial. This paper proposes the concept of hybrid booting with the incremental hibernation technique. The proposed technique periodically stores the state of the BMC and offers various recovery options based on the saved 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 compared to the existing hibernation technique in terms of execution time, disk usage, and booting time. The experimental results show that the proposed technique efficiently enables BMC backup and reduces the booting times.