Artesyn ATCA-8330 Installation and Use (April 2015) - Manual (Page 134)

Intelligent Peripheral Management Controller
ATCA-8330 Installation and Use (6806800S82B) 134
7.2 Firmware Architecture
The IPMC firmware basically consists of three major parts:
 Boot loader
 Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL)
 Application Layer
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.
The Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) is responsible for initializing the H8S and making all
preparations necessary for running code written in C. 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.
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.