Artesyn ATCA-7480 Installation and Use (February 2015) - Manual (Page 282)

IPMI Feature Set
ATCA-7480 Installation and Use (6806800T17A) 282
9.1 Firmware Architecture
The IPMC and MMC firmware basically consists of four major parts:
 Boot loader
The boot loader maintains redundant copies of the firmware in flash. Each time the IPMI
firmware is upgraded, a redundant copy of the current IPMI firmware is made in flash.
 Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL)
The Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) is responsible for initializing the A2F/ATMEL and
making all preparations necessary for running the code written in C language. The time
management facility of the HAL is responsible for providing a means for measuring time
and detecting timeout conditions. The device drivers are responsible for implementing
high-level interfaces to the hardware.
 Network Stack
The network stack is provided to implement RMCP+ protocols for IPMI-over-LAN and
Serial-over-LAN.
 Application Layer
The Application layer is implemented as a multi-threaded application. The main thread
reads incoming messages/events from various inbound queues, processes these
messages/events, and produces outgoing traffic to appropriate hardware interfaces.
The IPMC provides a number of subsidiary threads to serve RTM module discovery and e-
keying management.
The Application layer can also operate in standalone mode intended to debug the payload
without requiring a shelf manager.