This relates generally to management engines.
A management engine or service processor is an isolated and protected computing resource. It provides information technology management features independent of any installed operating system, including allowing improved management of corporate assets and a standardized corporate assets management technology. It includes firmware that provides management features for clients. It also allows system administrators to remotely manage a platform that has the management engine on it.
The management engine may include a host embedded controller interface (HECI), which is a bidirectional bus that allows the host operating system to communicate directly with the management engine, exchanging system management information in events. HECI enables the host operating system to control other devices, such as out-of-band controllers, wakeup on local area network, and power supply devices, as examples.
The management engine is an embedded controller running a lightweight microkernel operating system that provides a low power, out-of-band execution engine for management services. At system initialization, the management engine loads its code from system flash memory. This allows it to be up and running before the main operating system is started.
For run time data storage, the management engine may access to a protected memory at run time, in addition to a small amount of on-chip cache memory for faster or more efficient processing. In some cases, the protected memory may be a protected area of system memory. One feature of the management engine is that its power states are independent of the host operating system power states. This allows it to be up and running when the central processing unit and other components of the system are in deep sleep states.
As a result, the management engine can be a fully functioning component as soon as power is applied to the system. This allows it to respond to out-of-band commands from information technology management consoles without having to wake up the rest of the system, thereby reducing power consumption.
In order for the management engine to access the network while the host operating system is absent, the management engine uses direct access to network interfaces. The management engine manageability services share the Internet Protocol address of the host operating system, by using specific and dedicated transport level (Level 4) ports to distinguish manageability traffic from regular host traffic.
In many cases, it is desirable to provision software to a platform. A platform is simply any computer-based device that uses software. In some cases, it may be desirable to provide updates to platforms after they have already been distributed to end users. In other cases, new software may be distributed to those users. In addition, drivers may be provided as well.