sinuscosinustan
Tan (they/them or she/her) is an open-source firmware developer with a focus on OpenBMC and embedded Linux. She has previously worked as an SRE for a cloud provider, where she gained experience in large-scale infrastructure management and also worked on firmware. Outside of her day job, she has a broader interest in network administration and automation (mostly Arista and VPP).
Session
Every server depends on firmware to boot and most also rely on firmware for remote management. U-Boot, EDK2 (UEFI), OpenBMC, you name it. And they all share the same issue: IPv6 support ranges from half-baked to non-existent. Why is this still the case in 2026?
In this talk I'll go into two areas of server firmware that operatores rarely look at closely: the one that boots the server, and the one that allows out-of-band management via the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC).
On the boot side: Do PXE and HTTP boot actually work over IPv6? And what unexpected side effects do you might see?
On the management side: How does IPv6 support look on a BMC today, and what's still broken?
Nobody's going to fix what nobody complains about. Let's find out how broken this is and what we can do about it.