Picked up a miniforum BD770i thinking it would make for a great high performance opnsense router. At first things went well, loaded it up with 2 stick of ddr5-5200 for a total of 32GB. Ran memtest and stressapptest for 48 hours no issues.
Then my Intel E810-XXVDA2 25Gb nic arrived. Once I put the nic into the system it hangs at the MINISFORUM boot logo for at least 10 minutes every time the system is booted. Not only from a cold boot but reboots as well. Remove the nic and it boots right up real fast again no issues! Clear cmos does nothing to help. Once it finally boots with the NIC installed everything works fine (I think).
The board shipped with BIOS 1.02 so I decided ok i’ll update to the latest bios 1.05 and unfortunately no change.
If anyone has any tips for a BIOS setting that might possibly help that would be awesome. If this is some kind of a BIOS bug i’ll just have to return this thing to amazon unfortunately which would be a real bummer…
Yup, emailed them immediately. If its a bug in the bios/uefi i’ll be at their mercy. I just wasn’t sure if there was some magical combination of eufi settings that I could possibly change to at least temporarily alleviate this issue. So far my attempts at randomly messing with things have had 0 affect.
The problem is that Minisforums still is a small company and it’s one of their first Mainboards for “normal” Systems I guess… In their minipcs such a variety of I/O Devices simply isn’t possible…
So let’s give em some time to figure it out - I think it will become better and better over time. The ppl just have to give em hints and advices with their problems via support mail and the rest must be done by the support of Minisforums then.
I hope they will have success with those ITX boards cuz they’re really a nice niche Product that could fill many roles where a fully customizable ITX board makes no sense or isn’t necessary.
(Also had some hard issues at the beginning, but that’s why we’ve 1.04 and 1.05 now.)
I agree. I’m rooting for them. This is a wonderful product and I really hope they can get things a little more polished. I’m not excited to moving to a system that idles at 10-20watts more to achieve a similar level of performance.
I have until Jan 31 to return this thing so hopefully their support will show some indication of working on it before then otherwise I’ll be forced to return the board.
Did you go into UEFI setup and disable the NIC boot ROM and/or remove it from the boot priority list?
By factory default, most NICs will have boot ROM enabled, so that the UEFI firmware can use the NIC as a netboot/PXE device, with some higher-end NICs supporting iSCSI initiator etc.
These will try to get their config from DHCP and may take a while to timeout and resume the UEFI boot sequence.
Second-hand NICs may also have a static config set to boot from a specific IP address and delay while retrying.
If you disable full-screen logo, then the NIC’s ROM should log this stuff to the UEFI framebuffer/console as it does this.
Thanks, this is an excellent theory! Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any indication this is the problem I’m having from the post screen (I was able to disable the boot logo) and after digging through every bios sub menu I’m unable to disable anything more than I already have but it was for sure worth looking into!
@bleomycin Any luck here? I’m also thinking of building a forbidden router in 2U rackmount with it running OPNsense. I have an x550-T2 to use in the PCI slot, but if it hangs when installing a NIC that’s kind of a non-starter.
Yes and no I guess depending on how you look at it.
I gave up on the Intel E810-XXVDA2 and switched to a connectx4- lx which is working just fine. I’m guessing it has something to do with the option rom on the intel card not being exposed within the uefi of the miniforum bios for some reason but I’m super not sure about that!
I guess the lesson learned is buy from somewhere with a generous return policy when dealing with these weird janky platforms. I hope they gain enough traction that these types of issues are a thing of the past in the future as the performance per watt is incredible.
I currently use unRAID for my NAS with OPNsense in a VM but that hardware is aging for much beyond that and quite power hungry. I’ve done a bunch of reading on Proxmox but have yet to deploy it. Snapshots in a VM are nice.
I’m in Canada, but headed to the U.S. next weekend. The BD770i is about $300 cheaper stateside on Amazon than here, so I was considering picking one up. Sounds like the X550-T2 might still be a gamble getting it to work though, and buying it in the U.S. puts a damper on my ability to return it if I need to.
Dang - I have exact same setup and I see the same issues - it takes a good minute for the BD770i to proceed after BIOS. The E810 seems to work well once booted though!
How well does the the mellanox card work for your in proxmox though? From what I understood there is little-to-no support for mellanox cards with netmap (the engine opnsense and most linux uses). Is it a huge performance hit to use mellanox?
Sorry just saw your reply. Only 1 minute waiting on the E810 isn’t so bad, I’d be willing to put up with that!
I have to admit I didn’t thoroughly research mellanox before picking up the connectx4-lx outside of reading a servethehome review and some quick googling. This is the first time I’ve been made aware of the netmap issue.
To answer your questions I’m not sure if I’m hitting any performance issues because of this?
It seems like zenarmor may be the biggest casualty of this problem from another quick google but i haven’t tried zenarmor yet.
Under testing I’ve been able to do inter-vlan routing through the virtualized opnsense router tapping out 2x10Gb test machine through the 25Gb port on my connectx4-lx using iperf3 with the standard mtu settings simulataneously.
i was also able to route 10Gb through the WAN port of this virtualized opnsense instance as well in my testing.
I am curious about zenarmor in general but it’s tough to find any current info online about this mellanox netmap issue.
My connectx4-lx seems to be using the mlx5 driver under opnsense. From searching the netmap github issues it seems there is some support for mlx5? Issues · luigirizzo/netmap · GitHub
Seems like I just need to test it at some point?
It’s a real bummer intel NIC’s throw this BD770i for such a loop.
I have strange issue. Than I put something to x16 slot I lost onboard ethernet adapter, no matter that I choose to activate boot options with pxe like suggested above.
I tried GPUs, Sata controllers, NVME hubs. I don’t have network card to test original issue. Proxmox VMs bringing only with network card, wifi card don’t work for bridging.
Does anybody get something like this or find workaround?
