Supermicro Xeon D SuperServer BIOS 1.3 released pretty much just for Spectre mitigation / IPMI 3.58 is still the latest

Posted by Paul Braren on Mar 27 2018 (updated on Aug 9 2018) in

BIOS 1.3 has been released mostly just to address Side Channel Speculative Execution and Indirect Branch Prediction, also referred to as Spectre (type 2) mitigation. This new release was first spotted by jrp Friday evening Mar 23, with my usual TinkerTry'ing and documentation effort still underway, starting with a successful upgrade of my Xeon D-1567 system on Mar 24, with my Xeon D-1541 up next.

I just received the detailed BIOS 1.3 Release Notes today, and put them in the usual spot for you here.

Download Xeon D Mini ITX BIOS 1.3

(eg., SYS-5028D-TN4T, SYS-E200-8D)

Next to your motherboard model here, download X10SDVF8_213.zip, with X10SDVF8.213 inside. Direct download links are no longer shareable, you get this error, but you can get close by clicking on Accept on this site.

Download Xeon D Flex ATX BIOS 1.3

(eg., SYS-E300-8D)

Next to your motherboard model here, download X10SDVT8_319.zip, with X10SDVT8.319 inside. Direct download links are no longer shareable, you get this error, but you can get close by clicking on Accept on this site.

Step-by-step instructions

Meanwhile, all the rest of what you need to know appears right here, in the original article, including detailed update procedures. I'm also experimenting with a faster method via IPMI that doesn't reset your BIOS settings, but I'm only testing that moving from 1.2c to 1.3, which is a relatively small jump.

supermicro-superserver-bios-12c-and-ipmi-358-released

Supermicro Xeon D SuperServer BIOS 1.2c / IPMI 3.58 released
Oct 21 2017

Video

BIOS Upgrade using Web UI

Moving from 1.2c to 1.3 required two attempts.
In this first video, you'll see I have an issue with my first attempt at updating my BIOS using the Web UI (IPMI), but the second attempt succeeds. Apparently I'm not the only one seeing this. What also is odd is that I left the default "Preserve SMBIOS" checkbox on, which is the default, and it failed, I found myself back at factory defaults.

Supermicro SuperServer Xeon D BIOS 1.3 update via browser works, on my second try.

So at least 3 lessons were learned here, with my lab tinkering:

always backup or notate your BIOS settings before you begin, since your settings may be lost
the most robust upgrade method still appears to be what the BIOS download bundle txt file recommends, DOS bootable media that requires physical server access
SUM or Redfish API might be as robust, that needs further investigation, but those have a steeper learning curves intended for bigger clusters than my 2 nodes
another Supermicro owner seems to have experienced the same first-time-fails, second-time-succeeds issue, I'll communicate this potential bug with Supermicro in hopes of a more robust Web UI method of BIOS upgrades in the future