Intel Shows RealVNC Embedded In the BIOS 154
LWATCDR writes "At Intel Developer Forum, Intel and RealVNC demoed RealVNC integrated at the BIOS level. Using VNC, one can now power down, power up, reboot, go into the BIOS, and even mount disk images on the network. All of this has been available for a while using IPMI but now it can be done using the open standard VNC. It is available now on Q57 and Q67 motherboards. One can just imagine how useful this could be in a data center, school, or any other system with a large number of computers. Let's hope AMD joins in."
Re:REALLY useful (Score:4, Interesting)
More then likely this is integrated at the BMC (baseboard management controller). While the BMC may be integrated into the system and a few values override some of the DMI it is not technically the BIOS. I've run into several systems with dead BMCs and they will happily chug along and act mostly normal. (DMI values revert to the BIOS provided values)
You can obtain the source to the FRU and play with your hearts content. Unfortunately, these are typically available on their high end S5000 and above series boards. SuperMicro makes some cheap boards with IPMI, but I don't know if it is a similar BMC setup. Now, the kicker is the BMC is just linux on a chip managed through IPMI. You can obtain and modify this to your hearts content. Though I don't know if they left out any bits and the system firmware is still a binary blob I believe.