X99-WS/IPMI: FRU & VGA Priority

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hitech95

New Member
May 21, 2020
3
0
1
Hi,
I’ve bought an used X99 WS / IPMI MB. It seems to work mostly fine.
After an initial struggle on restoring the IPMI/iKVM password I’ve managed to login on it.
Then I’ve discovered something I’ve never seen on my old DELL servers with iDRAC: FRU Information.

After some research I’ve got that there is a i2c bus with eeproms that can push infos to the IPMI interface. Looks like that I’ve bought a MB that was part of a Ciara Technologies Server.
It have the Chassis Serial No and the Server Model and more baked on it.
I’ve already tried to reflash the BMC firmware and I’ve also tried to restore it to default but thoose info are still there.
On the Mb itself there are only two SPI Rom (actually there are more due to other peripherals like the TPM chip and the Intel NICs).
The mains are: the bios one and the one for the BMC.
Is there any way to clear/edit thoose parameters? I’m mostly using the iKVM interface to have remote console access. So this is mostly for my curiosity.


Anyway, I was tring to work out how to to my GPU passthrough, (It actually failed with the error 43 and I did not had any luck on bypassing that, and I dont have an AMD card to test with) but during tests I've discovered somethign quite annoing.
I'm new with UEFI, I still prefer the good old bioses.

In the bios there is an option for VGA priority, this seems to work fine only when CSM is enable. If I disable (and I have a compatible UEFI GPU installed) there is no way to set the onboard AST GPU to work, this means that I cannot use the KVM. The bios output goes via the discrete GPU, even if there is no cable attached.
(and yes the VGA Priority is set to onboard)

I've bouth this MB for its iKVM feature due to the fact that I will puth the server in a closet and I don't have the space for the whole setup. I would like to have a discrete GPU in that for HW transcoding on my Windows VM. But the fact that the VGA priority is not respected worries me.

Am I doing something stupid?

The mainboard have a lot of jumpers and connectors that are actually not documented on the manual, does you think that the asus support will give me an answer for this "old" board?
 

samwathegreat

New Member
Apr 1, 2020
20
15
3
The onboard GPU is incompatible with UEFI - you'll HAVE to use CSM in order to take advantage of that. There's no real benefit to UEFI here anyways. Now...if you run a hypervisor, you CAN have the virtual machines be UEFI and that works great (is preferred for doing passthrough). But the bare metal must boot CSM to be able to use the BMC.

There is no reason that passthrough won't work on this machine...I have 2 identical boards (with the same FRU info) and they work fine with proxmox and passthrough.

Hope you have resolved the issues by now. Good Luck.