Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT) is a hardware-based solution that provides Out of Band (OOB) remote manageability functions that are independent of the system’s power and operating system (OS) state.

The two components of Intel AMT that allow interaction between the Intel® AMT client and the OS are the Manageability Engine Interface (MEI) device driver and the Local Manageability Service (LMS). The MEI driver, also known as the Host Embedded Controller Interface (HECI) allows applications to access the Intel AMT firmware via a host interface rather than a network interface. The LMS allows applications to access the Intel® AMT firmware via the local MEI interface.

This white paper outlines the steps to upgrade the Intel® AMT 5.0 MEI and LMS drivers to build and run on Linux kernel 2.6.31. It also includes a patch of MEI 5.0.0.30 and LMS 5.0.0.30 to enable compilation of the MEI driver and LMS on kernel 2.6.31 respectively.

The paper also includes a patch that enables the power management feature in the MEI 5.0.0.30. This patch is optional and can be applied on systems where the driver fails to save the state of PCI configuration before going into standby (S3) or hibernate (S4) system states, resulting in loss of local functionality on the Intel AMT client.

The paper discusses supported hardware, and implementation details, including application of patches, building and installing MEI drivers and driver verification.