ASRock Rack X570D4U

Project status: in progress

The ASRock Rack X570D4U series of mainboards consists of three mainboards with an AMD X570 chipset and AM4 socket. ASRock Rack sells the board in three versions: a cost reduced version without a 10Gbit NIC (X570D4U), a version with an Intel 10Gbit NIC (X570D4U-2L2T) and a version with a Broadcom 10Gbit NIC (X570D4U-2L2T/BCM). These boards contain an Aspeed AST2500 BMC chip. A Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) is a small computer built into the motherboard that allows for out-of-band management. It allows for remote power control, KVM (remote keyboard, video and mouse) control, virtual media insertion and much more.

PropertyValuePart
ProcessorARM1176JZS (ARMv6) @ 800MHzAST2500 SoC
RAM512MB DDR4K4A4G165WE
Storage64MB SPI flashMX25L51245G

These parts make for quite a powerful system, unfortunately the operating system shipped by ASRock Rack is proprietary and dos not allow for easy modification. To allow for a more secure, transparent and customizable experience we are working on adding support for this mainboard to the mainline Linux kernel and the OpenBMC Linux distribution for BMCs.

Official documentation is provided in ASRock Racks manual for these mainboards. Not a all headers and connectors are described in this manual. The pinout of the undocumented connectors and headers can be found on the pinout page.
The BMC has a programming header, a debug serial port, I2C busses and GPIOs.

Project status

Enabling the use of the mainline Linux kernel and OpenBMC on this hardware is an ongoing effort. An initial port of OpenBMC missing most board specific features can be found here.