nvidia-pcm: A D-Bus-Driven Platform Configuration Manager for OpenBMC Environments
2026-02-27 • Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created a tool called nvidia-pcm to simplify managing firmware for different but similar NVIDIA GPU platforms. Instead of making separate firmware images for minor hardware differences, nvidia-pcm uses one image that adjusts itself based on the specific hardware it detects at startup. This makes firmware management easier by using configuration files instead of building new firmware for each variant. Their work focuses on practical simplicity rather than complex hardware modeling.
GPUfirmwareNVBMCOpenBMCD-Busplatform configurationJSONenvironment variableshardware identity
Authors
Harinder Singh
Abstract
GPU-accelerated server platforms that share most of their hardware architecture often require separate firmware images due to minor hardware differences--different component identifiers, thermal profiles, or interconnect topologies. I built nvidia-pcm to eliminate that overhead. nvidia-pcm is a platform configuration manager for NVBMC, NVIDIA's OpenBMC-based firmware distribution, that enables a single firmware image to serve multiple platform variants. At boot, nvidia-pcm queries hardware identity data over D-Bus and exports the correct platform-specific configuration as environment variables. Downstream services read those variables without knowing or caring which hardware variant they are running on. The result is that platform differences are captured entirely in declarative JSON files, not in separate build artifacts. This paper describes the architecture, implementation, and deployment impact of nvidia-pcm, and shares lessons learned from solving the platform-identity problem at a deliberately minimal level of abstraction--prioritizing adoption simplicity over comprehensive hardware modeling.