Supermicro boards - why do they POST so slowly?

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

mb300sd

Active Member
Aug 1, 2016
204
80
28
34
Normally not much of an issue, but I had a massive headache last night where I kept having to restart into DOS, UEFI shell, Linux, over and over.

Why the heck do these boards take so long to POST? Is there any setting I'm missing that will speed things up?
 

gea

Well-Known Member
Dec 31, 2010
3,141
1,182
113
DE
The delay is mostly due IPMI.
You can disable IPMI to speed up boot but mostly you want IPMI on a server board.
 

Deslok

Well-Known Member
Jul 15, 2015
1,122
125
63
34
deslok.dyndns.org
IPMI like Gea said as well as other controllers(raid controllers have their own bios to load) and network cards checking for things like PXE as well.
 

mb300sd

Active Member
Aug 1, 2016
204
80
28
34
Got to be the IPMI. All oproms are disabled so no raid controller bioses or pxe. Not willing to give that up, since the system is completely headless and I was doing all that over IPMI.
 

altano

Active Member
Sep 3, 2011
280
159
43
Los Angeles, CA
I've also found boards with onboard SAS controllers to boot up much slower as well. My M11SDV board boots up 10x faster than my X10SDV board that has an LSI 2116 onboard.
 

DedoBOT

Member
Dec 24, 2018
44
13
8
Intel's MBs aren't different .
Have few SM and Intel boards - roughly equal boot times. Yes, it's irritating , especially when you're on hurry :)
 

Deslok

Well-Known Member
Jul 15, 2015
1,122
125
63
34
deslok.dyndns.org
Any server board really compared to consumer ones really, remember the ipmi is literally a second computer and most of your controllers are far more capable than their consumer equivalents and have their own initialization times as well.
 

WANg

Well-Known Member
Jun 10, 2018
1,302
967
113
46
New York, NY
Eh, ever boot up a PowerEdge R620 with the baseband controller/DRAC and RAID controllers active? It's just as bad, if not worse.
The more hardware features you have attached to your machine, the longer it'll take for the hardware to run through its startup diagnostics.
 

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
1,394
511
113
IIRC some of the ASRock server boards have a "wait for BMC" toggle in the BIOS that allows you to skip waiting for the IPMI to come up before you can boot, but I don't think I've seen this on any SM boards.

90 seconds is nothing, I used to work with some IBM servers that took over 15mins to POST.
 

BLinux

cat lover server enthusiast
Jul 7, 2016
2,669
1,081
113
artofserver.com
like others have said already, i don't know of many actual server grade systems that have really fast POST times. Not supermicro, not Dell, not IBM, not Intel, ... don't know about recent HPE, but they took while when I worked on Compaq servers. these days, i always disable memory test during POST to speed it up.

question is then:

1) are there any server grade systems that have really fast POST times? (relative to all the above mentioned brands of servers)

2) what are some tips you guys have to speed up POST?
 

mb300sd

Active Member
Aug 1, 2016
204
80
28
34
Supermicro is just what I've had most experience with, not to pick on them. My Intel board that I couldn't get to work with a QS CPU seemed to be a little faster (with a temp CPU) but not by much.

Not much I've found to speed things up. Disabling all oproms and unused onboard devices helps, but it's still slow.

You would think there'd be some demand for super fast boot times for minimum downtime when you have to update. It takes this server longer to POST than it does to load Windows and restore 20 VMs off NVMe storage. I'd certainly love to see a "fast boot" option added like on consumer systems. Just initialize the absolute minimum and let the OS take care of the rest.