Supermicro SuperServer Xeon D / X10SDV BIOS Release Notes Changelog

Posted by Paul Braren on Nov 7 2016 (updated on Jan 21 2020) in

Looking for just the latest release notes? Jump below.
Looking for the BIOS 1.2c release? Jump to this detailed article.

What does BIOS stand for? Basic Input/Output System, see Wikipedia:

The BIOS (/ˈbaɪ.ɒs/, an acronym for Basic Input/Output System and also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS or PC BIOS) is a type of firmware used to perform hardware initialization during the booting process (power-on startup) on IBM PC compatible computers, and to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs.

Backstory, and why this is kind of a big deal

When making a significant investment in Xeon D systems from Supermicro, IT Pro's like myself sure do prefer full transparency. This has been a concern for Supermicro owners for years, and something that quite surprised me when I tried my first Supermicro system back in June of 2015, as I mentioned here.

For IT infrastructure companies that are serious about the enterprise, there's typically considerable pressure for them to grudgingly be transparent with their release notes, even if it can be mildly embarrassing. It's what IT Pros demand, especially folks like myself with a background in IBM, HP, and Dell gear.

Supermicro is now one of the fastest growing IT Infrastructure companies, see also Supermicro® - 18th on Fortune's Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies Worldwide. This lack of transparency was unfitting, but I'm happy to report that this has now (mostly) been addressed. I have permission to publish the "missing" readme.txt/release notes/changelog, ready to share right here at TinkerTry, and for now, only at TinkerTry. Longer term, I'm hoping Supermicro just goes ahead and provides these right with their firmware upgrade bundles.

I plan to update this article, as new releases arrive

Meanwhile, I plan to prepend any newer release notes for subsequent releases on this same page. If you experience what might be a firmware related issue, and you then spot something in these release notes that indicates it might be fixed, this article can make it easier to decide whether you wish to take on the risk of a firmware upgrade.

To see ways to actually perform these upgrades, see also:

New Supermicro BIOS 1.1c and IPMI 3.46 for Xeon D SuperServers features HTML5 iKVM

If you find an issue, please reference this article, and take the time to report the problem(s) to Supermicro Support so they can track them, and determine which issues warrant a fix in a future release.

If you find that publishing these notes is helpful to you, please drop a comment below this article, it's quick and easy.

BIOS Known Issues

This is a collection of observations I have made when testing and using this level of code, and issues that others have reported through comments below.

BIOS 2.1 Known Issue(s)

None

BIOS 2.0 Known Issue(s)

None

BIOS 1.2c Known Issue(s)

Paul Braren - None noticed with this release in the first weeks, with ESXi 6.5U1EP04 working fine with it.
Bryce Wilkins - I did get this one report via the comment he dropped here, with what may be an odd interaction with NVMe drives.
Jan 19 2018 - I do have some reports from some users of 10G (Intel X557) experiencing network-port-down issues. A smaller set of Xeon D owners have reported Intel I350 enumeration swap issues when upgrading ESXi. These two issues may pre-date BIOS 1.2c, and have been explained in detail.

BIOS 1.2b Known Issue(s)

Paul Braren - None noticed so far. ESXi 6.5 Update 1 and Windows Server 2016 seem to work fine, including boot-from-NVMe and NVMe VMDirectPath IO pass-through, using the latest firmware 320 on an engineering sample of Intel Optane P4800X.

BIOS 1.2a Known Issue(s)

Paul Braren - When an Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Series PCIe card is installed, Windows Server 2016 will fail to boot from NVMe if the UEFI setting in the PCIe area of the BIOS settings isn't set. Once it's set, trying to get back into the BIOS for any reason by using the Del key will hang the system with a A9 shown at bottom-right, as pictured at right. Pressing F11 then choosing Enter Setup doesn't work either, blank screen. The onlyl work-around I've found so far is to physically remove the Optane PCIe card, change other BIOS settings as needed, then re-install the Optane PCIe card.

BIOS 1.2 Known Issue(s)

Paul Braren - On VMware ESXi 6.5.0d, attempts to pass through the AMD 100-506008 Radeon Pro WX 4100 4GB Workstation Graphics Card GPU card were a modest success on BIOS 1.1c, working about 50% of VM boots, with no edits to the VMX file required. I then noticed the passthrough broke after the move to BIOS 1.2, so I re-specified the hardware to passthrough by ESXi, rebooted, then pinned those 2 AMD devices to the Windows 10 Creators Update VM. But every boot now fails to see the GPU at all. The VisionTek 7750 included in Bundle 1 SuperServer Workstation continues to work with BIOS 1.2, as it had in BIOS 1.1.

BIOS 1.1c Known Issue(s)

Paul Braren - TinkerTry informally tested on Xeon D 1518/1528/1541/1567, found that 2400MHz memory gets seen as 2133MHz by OS, which I reported to Supermicro by video demonstration here.
User reports NVMe drive speed issue with a prior release was fixed.
User reports potential incompatibility with Samsung 960 PRO here, and his workaround. Note, Supermicro doesn't claim to support the Samsung 960 PRO / EVO M.2 NVMe drives in their tested M.2 list link found on their SYS-5028D-TN4T product page, I've reported this conspicuous lack of Samsung drives to Supermicro long ago. Certainly wouldn't hurt to file a support ticket with 24-Hour SuperServer Technical Support.
Paul Braren - For a Xeon D-1567 based PIO-5028D-TN4T-01-WD002 (Bundle 2 12 Core) with proper networking, upgrading to BIOS 1.1c seems to prevent bottom-left Intel I-350 default management port ETH0 from functioning, workaround is to move management to ETH1 (top-left) port instead, but a fix is to upgrade to newer I-350 drivers, with details here.

BIOS Release Notes

Supermicro Xeon D SuperServers based on X10SDV motherboards

All the release notes I have appear below, newest first.
I don't notice the PSOD fix mentioned anywhere:
ESXi host fails with PSOD when using Intel Xeon Processor E5 v4, E7 v4, and D-1500 families {2146388}
kb.vmware.com/kb/2146388
but that fix was apparently in BIOS 1.1c (based on numerous reader comments, especially VMware NSX users), and likely carried over into all later BIOS versions.
As an alternative to the bottom-edge slider, move your mouse cursor anywhere in the shaded area below, then use shiftkey+mousewheel to side-scroll, how cool is that?

BIOS 2.1 Nov 22 2019

The only information I have about this 2.1 release is from this TinkerTry comment, who said:

I reached out to Supermicro, and they gave me some rather vague info: "BIOS 2.1 update info for SYS-5028D-TN4T/ X10SDV MB BIOS 2.1 has Intel security fix and some bug fix.

BIOS 2.0a (Exact release date unknown)

X10SDVF8_A12.zip`.

BIOS 2.0 Jun 13 2018

BIOS 1.3 Feb 13 2018

~~Release Notes.~~

Mar 28 2018 Update - As mentioned above, I obtained written permission from Supermicro to share BIOS and IPMI release notes prior to first publishing them. Today, I was asked to remove the release notes from this article. I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.