HELP - ASUS WRX80 SAGE microSD CD ROM emulation not performing as expected

Hello everyone!

Today I decided to mess with the iKVM/BMC that the SAGE WRX80 comes with, and I wanted to test the “Image Redirection” functionality, which lets me emulate a storage medium so that I can boot ISO/IMG files from a remote server or from the micro SD card slot that is found on the bottom of the board.

Edited post: Further information is in my reply. This post was originally regarding the SD card slot functionality not working at all, which I have since fixed (format SD card as MBR, ext4 with external reader, insert into motherboard when the PSU power is switched off).

OK, so I got the SD card functionality working. I reformatted the SD as ext4, then shutdown the system and turned off the PSU for a minute. Booting the system back up seems to have fixed SD functionality.

So, despite getting that to work, local media redirection is practically useless. Mounting a Clonezilla ISO image or even a Manjaro installer is painfully slow. It takes a good minute for grub to load! I was waiting around for a good 5 minutes for the ISO boot, and ultimately gave up as the time it takes to boot is so painful that I may as well have created a USB boot drive.

I don’t know if this is an issue with the BMC hardware or software related, but one thing is certain, in its current state the image redirection and sd card slot features are practically useless unless you enjoy watching paint dry.

Edit: Benchmark results for local mass storage emulation and local CD ROM emulation:


(mass storage)


(CD/DVD ROM)

Edit:
It seems that this only affects local CD/DVD ROM emulation. I performed the same test using remote images (via NFS) and the performance is significantly better than local:


(remote NFS image, CD/DVD ROM emulation)

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