SuperMicro EPYC Board won't POST if IPMI is connected?

I seem to be having this issue on my H11SSL-NC board + EPYC 7302p. Is there anyway around this without connecting a keyboard and VGA monitor?

SnapStream Server Boots to SuperMicro PCI Bus Enumeration Message

 

Yes, tried a CMOS reset. It turns out if I have an add-on GPU installed it won't boot with IPMI console open. If the console is closed during bootup, I can boot to the OS. If I have the GPU removed, I can boot with IPMI console open.

As it stands I cant use IPMI if my add on GPU is installed. What a PITA.

 

@Patrick did you have an add-on GPU in any of the H11/H12 boards? That's what's causing my issue.

 

Any word from Supermicro?

My Supermicro X10 series boards, with Xeon E3-1200 v3 do something similar when an add-on GPU is installed. For example, when booting to Windows 10 while in the IPMI iKVM/HTML5 viewer, I see all of the standard pre-boot and bios messages, but barely get a glimpse of the blue Windows 10 flag that appears when Windows 10 first starts to boot up. The iKVM/HTML5 screen goes black, but the mouse still can move about in the screen. After playing with it a bit, the add-on GPU becomes the primary display auto-selected by Windows 10, and the iKVM/HTML5 display (which is run by the ASPEED 2400/2500 chip) becomes the secondary display and is sometimes disabled by Windows upon booting into Windows.

In Windows 10, if I have the ASPEED display adapter enabled (shows up as a "Microsoft Basic Display Adapter" in Device Manager), I can make it the "primary" display device and then the Windows 10 desktop shows up in IPMI iKVM/HTML5.

I have not yet tried this with ESXI or another server based OS, but I would imagine it would work similarly.

Have you tried going into the H11 bios and making the ASPEED 2500 the default/main/primary display? This should over-ride the boot preference which is usually given to the Add-on GPU in a 16x PCIe slot. Maybe try disabling the add-on GPU in the bios as well and see what that does. It may in fact show back up once you boot into the OS.

 

I have not spoken to SM yet as I had to get my board serial number as it was showing up in IPMI as 123456789 and you can't open a case with them without that. But I can say that in my testing, the only way my server will boot to the OS WITH the add-on GPU installed is if I set the add-on GPU as the default/primary. And disabling the add-on GPU is not an option as I need it for HW transcoding.

 

From past experience with many different motherboards, while using GPU's as your display output you will loose iKVM.
If you use your GPU's as a compute device, no video cable connected, iKVM will work.

iKVM will use the video controller found in the ASPEED chips or other IPMI device. Video from a GPU only displays through its own video output ports and cannot be redirected through the PCIe buss then to the IPMI controller, then iKVM.

With a server that has GPU's installed you will typically not use video outputs from the GPU, iKVM works fine. Workstations are a problem as you would normally be using the GPU to drive a display, no iKVM then but IPMI will work. If you want to be able to control the workstation remotely I suggest using Teamviewer or other tools like that.

 

In my case, I'm not using the add-on GPU to output any video. Nothing is even plugged into it. It's being used for HW transcoding. However, the server will not boot to the OS unless I set it as the primary video card and doing so leaves me unable to use the iKVM.

 

Ok I see what you are talking about, still early here for me and on first cup of coffee

Is there any chance you might have Above 4G Decoding BIOS option set to Disabled ?

I remember sometime ago on a SM WS motherboard it came with this set to disabled by default, I could not get it to boot with a GPU installed.
Fix was to take off the GPU, use IPMI to boot to BIOS, iKVM in and set that to enabled, then everything worked fine.

 

I don't even know what that setting is so it's definitely set to whatever the default is. I'll have to look into that the next chance I get into the BIOS.

 

The motherboard I had issues with this was a Supermicro X10DRC-T4+.
Here is the BIOS screen shot.
Most boards I run into have it Enabled by Default now.

 

I checked and Above 4G Decoding is Enabled by default.

So with onboard GPU set to primary, this is where my server sits and never gets past.

 

Argh... I hoped that would have worked.

 

So I contacted SuperMicro today and this was their response. Is this real life?

 

Wow, something must have gotten miscommunicated with that. Surely a simple video card for a workstation would work in a 16x PCI slot that is positioned right next to the CPU for just that purpose.

 

That's my initial thought as well. I'm going to try and get it escalated to someone who actually knows what they are talking about.

 

I have a 7302P on order and was waiting for the ATX H12 Supermicro boards to be released, but if that truly is SM's position on Epyc 7002 platforms, I don't see another choice but cancelling the 7302P order and going with an Intel Xeon solution. I need to have ECC support, so Ryzen isn't an option. Maybe someone from AMD can chime in here, as I'm sure they're following a number of forums and looking for any platform and related issues.

 

Looking at the H11 motherboard manual, have you tried physically disabling the physical VGA port on the motherboard with a jumper?
I'd be curious to see what disabling JPG1 does (Pins 1-2 VGA Enabled; Pins 2-3 VGA Disabled).

 

Not sure if this is the same thing mentioned earlier in this thread, but according to the manual, there is also a "VGA Priority" setting in the bios under the "PCIe/PCI/PnP" configuration options.

"VGA Priority - Use this setting to select between onboard or offboard VGA support. The options are Onboard and Offboard "