Elkhart Lake PSE and out of band management

[DaMichi]

Hello everyone!

I stumbled over the Elkhart Lake processor line with its Programmable Service Engine which supposedly provides out-of-band management capabilities (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/platforms/details/elkhart-lake.html). The one integrated remote management technology of Intel I know is vPro AMT and when following the link on the Elkhart Lake product page (open link above, then in Overview -> Key features on Elkhart Lake -> Remote device management) you actually also land on the AMT page (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/intel-active-management-technology.html). But when checking the ARK database (https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/codename/128825/products-formerly-elkhart-lake.html) none of the processors supports Intel vPro.
How to make sense of that?
Is this a new remote management interface beside vPro AMT? If yes, can you point me to information about it, please?
Or is this classical vPro AMT, but it still needs implementing on the new ARM PSE processor? Or do the board partners need to implement a remote management solution on their own and the PSE only provides a convenient interface to the CPU for it?

Greetings!

[Jaime_Lizarme]

Hello @DaMichi ,

Thank you for contacting Intel Embedded Community.

You are right, VPro is not supported by Elkhart Lake CPU or other Atom CPU; however ELK offers out-of-band management through the  the Intel® Programmable Services Engine (Intel® PSE), which uses an ARM microcontroller with dedicated hardware resources for real-time computing, network synchronization, and low-DMIPS computing also host functions like out-of-band management and network proxies. Please refer to the following Intel-Atom-x6000E-Pentium-Celeron-platform-brief for further details:

https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2020/09/Intel-Atom-x6000E-Pentium-Celeron-platform-brief.pdf

Best regards,

Jaime L.

Intel Customer Support Engineer

[DaMichi]

Hello @Jaime_Lizarme ,

thank you for your answer. Do you happen to know whether there is a software similar to MeshCommander (https://www.meshcommander.com/meshcommander) for this new kind of out-of-band PSE management?


Best regards,
DaMichi

[DaMichi]

Or any type of Toolkit, SDK, Documentation on how to start with this out-of-band management?
Do all Elkart Lake machines support it? Or does it require a special BIOS? E.g. does the
ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-J6412 support it?


Regards,

DaMichi

[DaMichi]

In the mean time I found some more information on this subject (in case anyone else stumbles over this thread and has the same questions).

This webinar gives some rough insight (you need to register and then can directly see the video):
https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/8259034789899269132?source=hr

But the real find was this:
https://github.com/intel/pse-fw/tree/main/services/ehl-oob
If I understand this right, you can use this sample code directly with a MQTT client or modify it for your needs. Currently the OOB-management is rather ... basic. Only Power on, Power off, Reset seem to be supported. Maybe the open source community can add some serial port forwarding at some point - that would be a useful addition.

I did not dig deeper into this, so I cannot comment how well this works so far.


Greetings,
DaMichi