[1][2] MCTP allows the transmission of a wide variety of management commands over alternative types of links.
Simplified nature of the protocol and reduced encapsulation overheads make MCTP suitable for implementation and processing within system firmware and integrated baseboard management controllers (BMCs), on a wide range of platforms – including servers, workstations and embedded devices.
Exposed configuration and monitoring operations include power management, control of Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) offloading, configuration of the out-of-band management traffic (which can be separated from the Ethernet traffic visible to the operating system by using RMCP ports filtering, a separate MAC address, or through VLAN tagging), and handling of NIC's interrupts and error conditions.
[3][6][7] DMTF also defines the Management Controller Host Interface (MCHI), which includes a set of discovery options and registration commands, allowing UEFI, BIOS or the operating system to communicate with a MCTP-enabled BMC.
Discovery options include PCI/PCI Express class codes as part of the PCI configuration space, MCHI Description Table and control methods defined and exported via ACPI, and data structures exported via SMBIOS.