Hi, I noticed that several people here mentioned interest or attempts to Bifurcate Supermicro X9 series pcie for use with Asus Hyper M2 x16 or similar. I've been searching everywhere for a way to get this working; has anyone had success?
Big thanks to mafrieger for the help. I managed to fresh install and configure an X9DRI-LN4F+. Couple of things not mentioned earlier:
1 - You cant UEFI boot from CD/DVD you must use a USB Bootdisk
2 - Didn't need any extra drivers at all, you can resolve the driver requirement for sata after the install (On Supermicro site as SCU driver)
I also tried to use an Asus Hyper M2 X16 quad card, only the first M2 slot works. I tried to enable the slot bifurcation with the hidden bios settings which did turn the PCIE speed setting for the slot from 1 setting to 4 but does not seem to configure the Root Ports correctly. PCIE Bifurcation can likely be added but only by a skilled bios engineer. Of course I am assuming that the Hyper M2 X16 card does not have any special requirements as I'm not sure how the VROC / Standard mode setting in Asus bios is applied.
How did you enable the hidden settings? Did you use AMIBCP to modify function access to 'USER'? Anything else?
Interested in this;
I am looking to mod my X9SRL-F BIOS to support NVMe and use this very adaptor (want to use a 960 pro for ESXi/FreeNAS VM datastore, and a PM953 for a FreeNAS SLOG).
Keen to understand why the other three ports aren't available. Did you ever find out anything further on this?
SuperMicro have confirmed by board supports bifurcation, so guess it must be to do with the ASUS chips onboard and VROC?
EDIT: have put in a query to Asus to see what they say. Will report back.
Cheers
Eds
?? I can't think what Asus mean by that.
I've put an Asus Hyper M2 X16 quad card in the single x16 slot of an Asrock Z370 board using bifurcation of x16 to x8x4x4 set in the BIOS .
This makes a single x16 slot into 3 separately functioning sets of lanes at x8, x4 and x4, so the quad card works perfectly with 3 SSDs onboard - and would see 4 SSDs if the ASrock BIOS had a bifurcation option of x16 to x4x4x4x4 - which supported Asus boards do. Gigabyte also has Z370 boards that do this.
So the Asus quad card definitely works with bifurcation - I can't really see how it could work otherwise ...
Modding a BIOS to introduce bifurcation sounds tricky.
I have a X9DR7-LN4F with Bios 3.3, and although bifurcation settings are visible, when I try to change x16 for instance, x16 is the only option I can select. Do any of yours actually allow you to select a different option?
When I first received the board, it had a 2.0 BIOS on it; and without thinking to back it up, I updated to 3.3 to get V2 CPU support. Oddly, I seem to recall though that when I looked through the 2.0 BIOS, I was able to select the bifurcation options, where I cannot now. Unfortunately I can't find an old BIOS to check that; does anyone have one?
It looks like
@davidm (71)? on the win-raid forum was able to do a similar mod to enable bifurcation on a different mfg's board:
RE: Add option in AMI UEFI bios menu (how to?) - 2
I've been trying to do similar, but the IFR Extractor tool has not worked for me -- anything I try to read with it spits back an error "Unknown protocol detected". I've tried it on several extracts from UEFI Tool; same result.