A Test and Debug Tool for ASPEED BMC AHB Interfaces

Warning

DO NOT USE THIS TOOL IF YOU HAVE NOT UNDERSTOOD ITS BEHAVIOURS IN THE CONTEXT OF YOUR TARGET MACHINE.

This tool pokes at low-level hardware and firmware interfaces of your machine. Particularly, the act of probing implies uncertainty about the consequences if the target device is not the device we hoped to find.

Use of this tool may lead to instability, crashes or critical failures of the target machine.

Introduction

ASPEED BMCs have several implicit modes of operation:

1. Development: BMC / host firmware bring-up
2. IO-Expander: The BMC does not run a dedicated firmware
3. Provisioned: The BMC runs a dedicated firmware

To provide for 1 and 2, the BMC exposes features on several of its slave interfaces that allow the host to reach into the BMC and perform arbitrary operations in its physical address space.

The significant interfaces hang off of both the PCIe and LPC buses, as either may not be connected to the host CPU in a given platform design.

Mode 3 is also typically used, but for the AST2400 and AST2500s the hardware is configured for modes 1 and 2 at cold boot. Thus the onus is on BMC firmware developers to ensure that all the interfaces are secured if they wish to maintain confidentiality, integrity and availability of the BMC's at-rest data and runtime environments.

Interfaces

• PCIe VGA P2A: A PCIe MMIO interface providing a arbitrary AHB access via a 64kiB sliding window

  • Write filters can be configured in the SCU to protect the integrity of coarse-grained AHB regions. By default the write filters are not enabled (all AHB regions are writable).

• iLPC2AHB: A SuperIO logical device providing arbitrary AHB access

  • A write filter that covers the entire AHB is exposed in the LPC controller. By default the write filter is not enabled (AHB is writable).

• Debug UART: A hardware-provided UART debug shell with arbitrary AHB access

  • Available on one of either UART1 or UART5

• X-DMA: Arbitrary M-Bus access

• PCIe BMC device: A collection of fixed PCIe MMIO interfaces providing restricted AHB access via 4kiB windows

• LPC2AHB: A BMC-controlled mapping of LPC FW cycles onto the AHB

Tool Features

• Currently supports use of the P2A, iLPC2AHB, LPC2AHB and Debug UART interfaces

• Probes for the availability of all interfaces over any available interface

  • Can optionally set the exit status based on confidentiality and integrity requirements. Ideal for integration into platform security test suites.

• In-band BMC console from the host

• Reflash or dump the firmware of a running BMC from the host

  • The BMC CPU is clock-gated immediately prior to beginning the flash operations, and ungated immediately prior to a SoC reset subsequent to completion of the flash operations.

• Read and write BMC RAM

• Also supports the Linux /dev/mem interface for execution on the BMC itself

Compiling

The tool compiles for multiple architectures, and at least the following have been tested:

• x86_64
• powerpc64, powerpc64le
• armv6

Building is a matter of issuing make, while cross compilation is performed by setting CROSS_COMPILE in the make environment, e.g:

$ make CROSS_COMPILE=powerpc64le-linux-gnu-

Execution and Example output

$ ./doit
Not enough arguments
Usage:

./doit probe [INTERFACE [IP PORT USERNAME PASSWORD]]
./doit ilpc read ADDRESS
./doit ilpc write ADDRESS VALUE
./doit p2a vga read ADDRESS
./doit p2a vga write ADDRESS VALUE
./doit debug read ADDRESS INTERFACE [IP PORT USERNAME PASSWORD]
./doit debug write ADDRESS VALUE INTERFACE [IP PORT USERNAME PASSWORD]
./doit devmem read ADDRESS
./doit devmem write ADDRESS VALUE
./doit console HOST_UART BMC_UART BAUD USER PASSWORD
./doit read firmware
./doit read ram
./doit write firmware
./doit replace ram MATCH REPLACE
./doit reset TYPE [INTERFACE [IP PORT USERNAME PASSWORD]]
./doit sfc fmc read ADDRESS LENGTH [INTERFACE [IP PORT USERNAME PASSWORD]]
./doit sfc fmc erase ADDRESS LENGTH [INTERFACE [IP PORT USERNAME PASSWORD]]
./doit sfc fmc write ADDRESS LENGTH [INTERFACE [IP PORT USERNAME PASSWORD]]

$ ./doit probe --require confidentiality digi,portserver-ts-16 <IP> <PORT> <USER> <PASSWORD>
Connecting to Digi Portserver TS 16 at <IP>:23
Logging into Digi Portserver TS
Configuring binary mode on port 4
Resetting port 4
Connecting to BMC console at <IP>:2104
Entering debug mode
Initialised Debug UART AHB interface
Performing interface discovery via Debug UART
Exiting debug mode
Have SuperIO: Yes
iLPC2AHB Bridge: Read-only
Have VGA PCIe device: Yes
Have MMIO on VGA device: Yes
P2A write filter state:
0x00000000-0x0fffffff (Firmware): Read-write
0x10000000-0x1fffffff (SoC IO): Read-write
0x20000000-0x3fffffff (Flashes): Read-write
0x40000000-0x5fffffff (Reserved): Read-write
0x60000000-0x7fffffff (LPC Host): Read-write
0x80000000-0xffffffff (DRAM): Read-write
Have X-DMA on VGA device: Yes
Have BMC PCIe device: No
X-DMA is unconstrained: No
Have debug UART: Yes
Debug UART enabled on: UART5
$ echo $?
1
$