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by drewg123 2765 days ago
For every good experience like that, there is an equal and opposite bad one.

I have an X399 Taichi for my TR2. I'm using 2 older U.2 NVMe drives that have a legacy boot option rom that causes the board to hang 9/10 times at POST. The only option is to disable CSM, so it will only try to use the UEFI option rom. This works fine, EXCEPT that the CSM disable is lost every time the board looses power. Eg, that configuration setting is not properly saved to non-volatile storage.

When I reported this to ASrock (via email), I was told in very broken english to "re install windows". This is great advice, considering I'm running FreeBSD, not to mention that the entire issue happens at POST. Sigh.
2 comments
Arie 2765 days ago
That's very interesting, that just made me realize my x299 ITX board has the exact same issue with CSM while trying to boot into OS/X (so also BSD-ish, but hackintosh). So a good chance of hanging on boot, unless I disable CSM and a power loss event will clear this CSM setting.
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drewg123 2765 days ago
This is interesting. FreeBSD has some... deficiencies... in the EFI bootloader's selection of memory to use at boot time. I wonder if the FreeBSD EFI boot loader and your hackintosh boot loader could be trashing the persistent memory where this CSM setting is stored. That might be why it is not a commonly reported issue.
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vetinari 2765 days ago
It may be a problem with your specific piece.

I'm also using X399 Taichi, it had flashed probably all released non-beta firmware versions except 3.00 and 3.10, with permanently disabled CSM and it had never lost that setting.

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drewg123 2765 days ago
FWIW, I'm currently running 3.2, and that's all I've ever run. I think there have been a few BIOSes since then, but I have not tried them. This bug is annoying, but manageable (esp. since the box is on a UPS), so I don't want to go through the hassle of an upgrade..
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washadjeffmad 2765 days ago
There are other benefits to using FW 3.30[1] over 3.2 wrt hardware support and features actually working (ie- IOMMU, PCI reset, ACS, etc).

[1] https://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/X399%20Taichi/index.asp#BIOS

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drewg123 2765 days ago
All I see in 3.30 is "Update "MdeModulePkg" module to improve M.2 RAID compatibility." I'd be thrilled if IOMMU support got better, but how can I tell from that? Eg, why do you say IOMMU support will improve? Are there more detailed release notes hidden someplace?

FWIW, I'm typing this on chrome running in a bhyve VM, and I pass a USB controller through via PCI-passthru (using IOMMU) for webcam and U2F dongle use by chrome.. The FreeBSD IOMMU driver whines a bit, but I just assumed that was buggy FreeBSD IOMMU support. Eg: "ivhd0: Error: completion failed tail:0x7e0, head:0x0."

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