Newbie question: What are the prospects that I could get Dfly to run on a working Supermicro server with...

[nacho Lariguet]

On Tue, 28 Jul 2020 20:13:13 +0200
David Walker <davidkwalker at gmail.com> wrote:

> CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2650L V3 (total 12 cores 24 threads)
> Ram: 4 x 32 GB DDR4 2133MHz 288pin Registered ECC
> Motherboard: Supermicro X10DRD-iNT
> (Apologies for this stupid question, but I am wondering whether I should
> buy the machine, offered used & cheap nearby by a reliable seller, before
> someone else does.)
> David Walker

From the point of view of the hardware there is nothing special with your machine.

From my past expierence with DragonFly the problem could lie with the BIOS/uEFI implementation.
Specially regarding your choice of video; whether you plan to use integrated video or else.
If you intend to boot in BIOS mode the chances that it boots up OK are almost 100%.
If you plan to boot in uEFI mode it all depends of how buggy the firmware is.

I have some Dell PowerEdge servers; namely R610s/R710s/T710s either v1 and v2 and none of them
boot DragonFly in uEFI mode; I mean, they boot it, but you end with no working console
since there is somewhere a problem with the efifb switching to the intended hardware,
in my case, AMD Radeon Pro video adapters,
same story for Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny M715q with AMD A10/R7 APU.

Almost all these servers rely on integrated Matrox G200 adapters
included in their BMC controllers
and the drivers/support for this chips (in general in BSD) is ancient.

If you are happy with booting through legacy BIOS,
I think there's almost no chance that it won't work.

Otherwise, wait for further advise here,
there's a lot of more expierenced people than me for sure.

PS: Have in mind that almost all the fancy management software for these type of servers
are almost coded for Windows or with some luck for CentOS/RHEL. For the most part you
don't need it to run the servers, I mean, status dashboards and the like. But I think
you should know at least.