I’ve been using TrueNAS CORE on an Asrock Rack board, and once that one died, I replaced it with a Supermicro M11SDV-4CT-LN4F. The same TrueNAS Core installation booted without issues on the 1.0c BIOS. When a new BIOS was released I attempted to upgrade, but found stability issues, so I reverted back to 1.0c.
Last year I migrated to TrueNAS Scale, and successfully ran it on the 1.0c BIOS. Then I thought I might attempt the BIOS upgrade again, assuming that something about BSD might not have played nicely with the new BIOS (1.3 as of this writing). I found the same stability issues as on TrueNAS Core though. After confirming that downgrading the BIOS fixed the instabilities, I thought it might be a good idea to try to reinstall TrueNAS fresh, but on the newer 1.3 BIOS, in case the issue was somehow in the old installation… but indeed, the TrueNAS scale ISO image had stability issues during the installation process and it crashed in the while extracting at 0%.
I confirmed that Slackware boots and works perfectly on both BIOS versions, so the issue is does not occur on all Linux distros…
I am currently finished downgrading the BIOS one more time, and reinstalling the OS without instability issues.
I am wondering if the TrueNAS binaries are built with some options that cause instability on the newer 1.3 BIOS? I wouldn’t have guessed such a thing is possible, but that seems to be the case from all my testing. I’d be infinitely grateful to get some insight into this issue and possibly a fix to run TrueNAS on the latest BIOS. Thanks!
Have you reported the issues to Supermicro?
I have, in fact they suggested reinstalling the OS, and tweaking some BIOS settings. It seems their first instinct was that maybe it is an issue with UEFI or Legacy BIOS booting. One of the things they mentioned is that there were microcode changes after BIOS version 1.0c. But I have been slow running the tests, my issue was closed, and they haven’t gotten back to my email, probably due to the holidays.
I will probably open a new issue with them next week, but I thought I’d first ask here since it appears to be an issue related to how TrueNAS is being built? But I also realize probably people here don’t have access to that specific hardware
If it runs fine on the 1.0c BIOS then why try and change that? If it aint broke don’t fix it especially when it comes to BIOS updates.
Indeed, I can’t gleam any specific reason from your initial post that would merit a BIOS update.
I wonder if the new BIOS changes RAM compatibility in such a way that whatever sticks you’re using aren’t a good match anymore? For kicks you could try running memtest on it, if you still have the newer BIOS installed.
Right, I didn’t write a reason to upgrade because there isn’t a real practical reason, it’s just something that has been in the back of my mind for about 2 years.
Running a memtest is a good idea indeed, I’m used to switching back and forth between the BIOS versions by now, I could give it a try… but again, I didn’t experience weird dmesg errors when running other Linux distros…
Admittedly, it’s a long shot. Your board has pretty good ECC support and one would expect it to caught errors.
Still, if nothing else, it gives you another Linux-based OS to test your HW on.