Supermicro X9DRT-F, PCI-E Bifurcation?

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Markess

Well-Known Member
May 19, 2018
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Northern California
The manual indicates Bifurcation is supported, and details the BIOS menu for it. But when I enter that menu, the Bifurcation control entry is black and I can't "select" it. "CPU1 Slot1 PCI-E 3.0 x16 Link Speed" only gives selections of GEN1, GEN2 or GEN3.

The motherboard has a single PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot that I'm hoping to bifurcate to use an HBA and a 10Gbe NIC, both of which are x8. I'm using a Supermicro RSC-R2UT-2E8R riser for testing.

So, I don't know if this is one of those Supermicro documented features that doesn't really exist, or if I'm in the wrong menu, need to activate bifurcation somewhere else first, or something else entirely.

If anyone knows how to make it work, any recommendations would be appreciated!

Thanks!

bifurcation.jpg
 
M

Markess

Well-Known Member
May 19, 2018
1,152
768
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Northern California
bzaras said:
do you have a latest bios? iirc the bifurcation options were added somewhere along the way
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I've got the newest BIOS, which is 3.2 from 2015. Unlike a lot of other X9 series, they don't seem to have issued a more recent update. For the other DP X9 board I had, I recall that bifurcation was available in 3.2, even though there's a newer BIOS for it now.

I asked Supermicro if a newer version was coming out, if only to patch for Spectre and Meltdown if nothing else. They said "Thank you for contacting Supermicro technical support. I don’t see that there is Bios available for the X9DTR-F. I am checking internally whether one will be released and if so what the expected release date. I will update you once I find out more details."

Which, if past history is any indicator, is Supermicro for "No, and you won't be getting one either."

I've looked into it a bit more, and I think that with more recent BIOS, all PCIe slot management is in a section labeled "PCIe Port Bifurcation Control" even if bifurcation isn't one of the available management features. In the case of this board, link speed is the only option in the menu because that's the only user option.
 
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azev

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Jan 18, 2013
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Surprisingly not all X9 board even the one with the updated bios 3.3 have bifurcation enabled. I dont exactly remembered the model, but I have various X9 board that do not have bifurcation enabled even after updating to the latest bios 3.3
 
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mal5305

New Member
Nov 4, 2019
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Indianapolis, IN
"Resurrecting" this old thread as I found it when I was troubleshooting bifurcation on my X9DRH-iF. I asked Supermicro and they provided me a new BIOS (looks like version 3.3 dated 2020-04-29).

Clipboard03.jpg

This enabled bifurcation:

Clipboard01.jpg

Clipboard02.jpg

However, I am trying to use an ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 Gen 4 Card and I couldn't get the 3 drives I have in it to show up :(

In 16x mode, only one drive (first slot) shows up. In x8x8 mode, only the drive in the third slot shows up. And in x4x4x4x4 mode, none of the drives show up. Still troubleshooting this one. But just wanted to throw an update in here.
 
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