Christian Walter

Overview

Christian Walter is Managing Director of 9elements GmbH (Cyber Security), a German firmware and cybersecurity firm, and a co-founder of the Open Source Firmware Foundation (OSFF), which he and Siemens established approximately 3–4 years before the 2025 OCP summit. Walter has been active in the open-source firmware space for 7–8 years and has observed OpenBMC become the de-facto BMC standard across the OCP ecosystem. He identifies stability and long-term maintenance as the primary remaining challenges: upstream drift, painful rebases, breakage risks, and the absence of LTS branches in coreboot and OpenBMC. He highlights Canopy BMC (an upstream-first cross-vendor OpenBMC distribution with CI/CD validation) and the OSFF's EuCRA compliance workstream as key solutions. He also advocates for engagement with OCP OPF's openSFI effort and OSFF membership/funding.