# How BSD-Friendly are Supermicro mainboards?



## lbc (Nov 3, 2012)

How many users are happily and silently running FreeBSD on Supermicro hardware without problems ?

I'm considering their mainboards to get access to an ECC memory supporting platform, but am finding that

  - access to resellers competent to answer questions about their products or willing to channel them to a Supermicro sales representative is next-to-impossible in my area

  - the OS Compatibility Charts published on their website feels like very partial, close to useless information.

  - issues are more than probably overrepresented in discussions about Supermicro boards.

So how BSD-friendly really are Supermicro's mainboards ? (And Supermicro as a company ?)


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## jb_fvwm2 (Nov 3, 2012)

Cannot answer directly; however FYI:

IANAE, but not a half hour ago I read a webpage where one of their' competitors' backplanes has exploding chips that took out many sata-3 drives.  Here, I'd get regular i5-i7 (intel) or equivalent AMD (the forum posts have examples) and not worry so much about ECC as about backups(!!), SUJ(!!), etc...
(server cases, not motherboards, but ...)


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## jnbek (Nov 4, 2012)

I'm running FreeBSD on a Supermicro mobo, though it's ~6 years old, however there are zero problems for me.


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## phoenix (Nov 4, 2012)

SuperMicro H8DGi-F and H8DG6-F work perfectly with FreeBSD 9.x (and Debian Linux 6.0).  We use these in our ZFS storage boxes and KVM VM hosts.  All devices are detected correctly.  And both console redirection and serial console via IPMI work.


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## xibo (Nov 4, 2012)

X9SCM here and everything is working. Primary NIC was initially causing trouble but that could be fixed with a firmware update.


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## Sfynx (Nov 5, 2012)

I'm running 9.0-RELEASE on an X8SIL-F and X8SI6-F as ZFS storage boxes without any problems. Just make sure you keep the Active State Power Management option in the Advanced Chipset Control BIOS screen at the Disabled setting (this is the default), because when I enabled this, my Intel NICs occasionally got stuck in a low power state, needing a full reset to resolve.

If the board has an integrated 6 Gbps LSI SAS controller, you need the mps driver introduced in 8.3-RELEASE and 9.0-RELEASE.


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## Terry_Kennedy (Nov 10, 2012)

lbc said:
			
		

> How many users are happily and silently running FreeBSD on Supermicro hardware without problems ?
> 
> So how BSD-friendly really are Supermicro's mainboards ? (And Supermicro as a company ?)


Many X8DTH-iF systems running here. I like it because of its consistent I/O connectors - I got tired of shuffling boards around in suboptimal ways to fit them into a mishmash of slots on other boards.

The only error I see is a minor misconfig in the ACPI tables, but it seems to be harmless:

```
ACPI Warning: Incorrect checksum in table [OEMB]
```
One-on-one support from Supermicro has been pretty good - I haven't had any problems getting answers from them (as opposed to some places that simply send a boilerplate reply that doesn't address the question). And I've asked them some seriously weird questions - for example, DIMM temperature monitoring, using my own SSL certificate in the IPMI, and so on.

BIOS and IPMI firmware updates just appear without warning (or documentation) on their support site. There doesn't seem to be any way to get notification that an update was released, and they don't provide any release notes. Plus, they warn repeatedly about not updating unless you're having a problem - but how to tell if it is fixed without updating, when there are no release notes.

One annoying thing is that their flasher utilities either wipe out your saved config settings (BIOS) or tell you that Bad Things will happen if you don't "reset to defaults" (IPMI). Sometimes updating the IPMI renders the remote console function useless until a hard power cycle. Not something you want to find out the first time you need to use the console, possibly months after updating the IPMI.


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## frijsdijk (Nov 12, 2012)

Fine. We have about 200+ running FreeBSD on SM servers ranging from yesterday up to about 5 years old.


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