Chapter 1 Overview of HP Management Base

HP Management Base is a collection of software that includes driver modules, daemons, shared libraries, lookup files, and utility support for other HP manageability software (such as SNMP Agents or WBEM providers).

All HP Integrity servers provide their platform manageability information using hardware that follows the Intelligent Platform Management Initiative (IPMI) specification. A key component of IPMI is the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC). Access to the BMC under Linux access is granted by the Open IPMI device driver.

The Open IPMI device driver started as an independent project and was accepted into the formal Linux kernel as of 2.4.22 and 2.6. Throughout its development, this driver has not taken full advantage of the capabilities of HP Integrity platforms, and some problems exist with older commercial Linux distributions:

A similar situation exists with the ACPI driver. The HP Management Base RPM supplies patched drivers for both ACPI and IPMI that work across the Integrity Server product line for all supported distributions. Pursuant to the GPL, source for these patched drivers is included. Other utilities and data files comprise the remainder of the RPM.