Thanks for sharing this info.
So the 4x SATA ports are optional and powered by PM8069, and they will only be present if you checkbox the "Integrated Microsemi SAS Controller (Proprietary)" on the purchase page, correct? Or in other words: if you don't checkbox "Integrated Microsemi SAS Controller (Proprietary)" you will receive a board with no SATA ports?
How is the Samsung NVMe drive physically connected (M.2/U.2 or PCIe slot)? What model# is it?
So BCM it is. They have a pretty thorough Diagnostic for their NICs. I'm using it on some of our servers when it's time to run diagnostics. It's DOS based (but they have an UEFI version as well) and it does check quite a few things ("Register Tests, Memory Tests, Miscellaneous Tests, Data Tests, Cable Tests, APE Register Tests and APE Diagnostics Tests"). For the BCM5719 the diag is located here: https://docs.broadcom.com/docs-and-downloads/docs/eula_download/570x/B57udia... It includes the B57Diag.pdf which might be of interest for anyone who wants to reverse engineer the fw.
On Wed, Sep 6, 2017 at 1:08 PM, Timothy Pearson < tpearson@raptorengineering.com> wrote:
On 09/06/2017 06:48 AM, Rene Shuster wrote:
So a case of "Dig before you call"? Anyways I'm re-sending my questions since it appears that you didn't receive them yesterday...
Timothy, Ubuntu Server is officially supporting Power8 ( https://www.ubuntu.com/download/server/power8 https://www.ubuntu.com/download/server/power8 ). Do you have insight if they will support Power9?
Yes, they will.
What's the name of the chipset your board will be using?
There is no chipset per se; as on most OpenPOWER systems the POWER PCIe lanes are brought directly out to the various on-board peripherals.
Also c an we get a complete overview of all the I/O ports
with Make and Model#. I see what looks like 4 SATA ports (in 2 different colors) on the board ( https://static.rptorcs.com/TL2B01/images/boardsmall.png https://static.rptorcs.com/TL2B01/images/boardsmall.png ), but they are missing in the documentation ( https://raptorcs.com/content/TL2B01/intro.html https://raptorcs.com/content/TL2B01/intro.html ).
The ports in question are driven off of the Microsemi SAS controller, so they work for both SAS and SATA. USB is driven by a TI USB 3.0 controller; serial is passed through the BMC (standard OpenPOWER design).
I would also like to know what make & model the SATA controller is and the model of the Broadcom NIC chip for example.
BCM5719. There's some good info about the internals of the chip online [1] that provides a starting point to write a replacement firmware if you're interested. Otherwise, like all other peripherals, the NIC is behind the IOMMU and cannot access data in the CPU domain without kernel permission.
You might also want to add info to the site about the optional Microsemi SAS 3.0 RAID controller. Right now it's unclear which one of their many ICs will be onboard (I assume it will be RAID-on-Chip: https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/storage-ics/
3689-raid-controllers
3689-raid-controllers> ).
I'll bring this up internally. It's the PM8068 controller (SmartIOC 2000).
Else keep up the good work and t hanks for making this happen.
No problem, thanks for the encouragement!
[1] http://esec-lab.sogeti.com/static/publications/10-hack. lu-nicreverse_slides.pdf
-- Timothy Pearson Raptor Engineering +1 (415) 727-8645 (direct line) +1 (512) 690-0200 (switchboard) https://www.raptorengineering.com