Supermicro Denverton boards do not fully support Optane drives

[geppi]

Well, at least this is the statement of their PM I had received in the communication on a support case.

After I plugged one of these Optane 900P 280GB beauties into the M.2 slot
(see https://www.servethehome.com/difference-intel-optane-900p-280gb-ssdpe21d280gasm-ssdpe21d280gasx)
on an A2SDi-H-TF motherboard I couldn't enter the BIOS setup anymore.

Everything else worked perfectly, i.e. entering the built in EFI shell, bringing up the boot menu and booting into Linux. The OS does see the NVMe drive and can read and write it. Just hitting <Del> during POST did leave me at a black screen with a small "A9" in the lower right corner.

The Supermicro support was not very helpful and after initially dropping their latest beta BIOS version on me I received the statement in the headline of this post.
The communication went on for a month until I decided that this will go nowhere and that I better find a solution myself or use the drive for something else.

So I disconnected the Optane 900P which enabled me to enter the BIOS setup again.
I disabled the SATA support for the M.2 slot and disabled loading the OPROM for the M.2 slot, reconnected the Optane drive and voilà - I can enter the BIOS setup now also with the Optane 900P connected to the M.2 slot.

I cannot tell which of the 2 BIOS setup changes helped because I didn't want to spend any more time experimenting with the setup. It works for me because I will only use the Optane SSD as a pure data drive for ZIL SLOG and L2ARC and do not plan to boot from it. Nevertheless I thought I share my experience with everybody who's planning to use a combination of Optane and SM Denverton MB.

Lessons learned:

1. Intel Optane drives do work in Supermicro Denverton boards as pure data drives.

2. They will probably not work as a boot drive because for this loading the OPROM code would be required.

I cannot completely exclude the possibility that it would work because I never tried to boot from my Optane SSD.​

3. Don't count on support from Supermicro for this combination.

4. STH users are not important to Supermicro.

This is no surprise looking at the business potential. However the level of "non support" on this case was outstanding.​

 

[zir_blazer]

As far that I know, Optanes should be booteable with generic NVMe support since the Firmware has no need to known whenever it is a standard SSD or what, just that it uses the NVMe interface. The rest is managed Disk side by the controller. Is like getting a SATA SSD working in an old computer, it just uses standard AHCI, the Firmware has no need to known anything about SSDs at all.

I'm not sure if Optane SSDs does have a loadable Option ROM or not. Some NVMe SSDs had it to include an UEFI Driver for platforms before they had built-in NVMe support. It may be possible that it has an Option ROM and its NVMe Driver conflicts with Firmware built-in support, but that is just a guess since I don't know if Optanes has an Option ROM or not.

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

I'm using an optane M2 in a A2SDi-8C+-HLN4F (very nearly identical to the A2SDi-H-TF) as a pure data drive without any issues (specifically for dm-cache). I've not tried booting from it though, and I'm not sure where the talk of option ROMs come from - EFI is meant to be able to directly boot from NVME without the need for an option ROM (that's kinda the point of EFI). I wasn't aware of any of the optane's invoking an oprom although I've not used any of the 900P's yet - possibly they're different.

 

[zir_blazer]

I've not tried booting from it though, and I'm not sure where the talk of option ROMs come from - EFI is meant to be able to directly boot from NVME without the need for an option ROM (that's kinda the point of EFI).

That is false. You still require Firmware Drivers - that was the selling point of Intel Broadwell generation Chipsets (H97/Z97), NVMe support was included in the Firmware out of the box. Some people backported the NVMe Drivers to older Motherboards via BIOS modding, making NVMe SSDs booteable in those. There was no reason why previous platforms couldn't support booting from NVMe by integrating the Driver in a Firmware update but Intel had to sell it as a "new feature".

Also, Option ROMs may have two different headers for code intended to be loaded by either BIOS or UEFI. You still need Option ROMs to support new device types that the Firmware has no built in support for (Best example: Video Cards. All modern cards have an Option ROM with both VBIOS and UEFI GOP)

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

That is false. You still require Firmware Drivers

Last I looked NVME boot was standardised and you didn't need per-device support. Any EFI supporting NVME boot should be able to support booting from an NVME device regardless of the type of device.

Nor have I seen any NVME M2 devices with option ROMs, legacy or otherwise; all the systems I've seen boot NVME directly.

 

[MiniKnight]

I've got a PCIe 900p 280GB's in a couple of A2SDi's and they work.