Asrock Industrial's 4x4 (AMD) support on Linux?

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I’m looking at couple of these mini PCs

Asrock Industrial 4X4 BOX-8840U: https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/4X4%20BOX-8840U
Asrock Industrial 4X4 BOX-AI350: https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/4X4%20BOX-AI350

And trying to figure out how well they’d work on Linux. Can’t really find any reports, so may be someone here might know.

I see that they both are using Nuvoton NCT5525D-S for their super I/O chip, according to the manuals’ block diagrams:

I can’t find any info on NCT5525 on Linux. Is it basically not supported?

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They’re x86 computers, they should run Linuxes fine.

What even is a super I/O chip? Seems like engineering level stuff if these are at the PCB component levels

Ok so on a quick glance:

The NCT5585D is a member of Nuvoton’s Super I/O series capable of monitoring critical parameters in PC hardware including power supply voltages, fan speeds and temperatures. The NCT5585D provides both high accuracy current mode sensing and low cost thermistor mode sensing.

Considering a lot of industry stuff runs on open source stuff as a means of cost cutting, I am willing to bet it will work but dont quote me on that.

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About the special capabilities like the super I/O chip I have no idea, the processor and GPU should be supported under Linux. To be honest since it is an industrial product I can hardly imagine that there is no support for Linux. Unfortunately the product website does not mention Linux at all, neither on the page nor in the documents. But my guess would be that it is all in the kernel and does not need separate drivers but that is a guess, no proof.

I am interested in that AI box, looks good.

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I think it would be best to just email sales of asrock industry and ask if it works.

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I did e-mail them, asking them to direct me to their technical support. They didn’t so far.

I don’t expect major problems, but super I/O chip support is useful for having working sensors like CPU fan speed. I couldn’t find it mentioned in any upstream nct drivers:

I did find some out of tree patches mentioning it, but that doesn’t look very promising.

May be it will work if I2C address and the rest are compatible, but who knows.

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Yeah, super I/O chips are responsible for sensors, fan control and etc. Nuvoton chips are in general supported well since they publish their hardware documentation (unlike others) - so always prefer them when buying some motherboard. But at the same time someone has to actually implement support in upstream Linux for it to work. Nuvoton is handled by nct#### drivers.

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What are you actually concerned about? BIOS will handle all these things just fine on its own.

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Sure, but I prefer to be able to have working sensors and monitor what’s going on. Plus with working hwmon there is always an option for custom fan control and etc. Basically, why not have proper functionality if it’s possible in theory.

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It looks interesting, but my other concern is that this CPU has asymmetrical cores. Not sure why they did that in this iteration (Zen 5 / Zen 5c). Their previous one has all same cores with boost to high frequency.

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Check for Nuvoton NCT5525D-S Linux support or use alternative drivers.

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I’m rocking 4 of these: https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/4X4%20BOX-V1000M. Little different, but they’ve been running Fedora Server and OpenShift just fine

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Unfortunately I can’t find a block diagram for it that shows what super I/O chip it uses.

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I tried, but can’t find any info. The only candidate that looks fitting could be Kernel driver NCT6775 — The Linux Kernel documentation

Which says that it supports a bunch of different nct chips with compatible I2C address.

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Any update?

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Nothing new, I haven’t found any information. Found one store that actually sells it with Linux pre-installed (and they in general say that Linux should work) but they don’t have it in stock now to test sensors specifically. They are OK with testing and returning it if sensor doesn’t work, so I might try that at some point.

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