BIOS

SuperMicro

Although it is possible - at least on AMD based A+ servers - to flash the BIOS using the flashrom tool, it is unfortunately impossible to use /dev/nvram to set the BIOS settings. Even reading is not possible, since the nvram is larger than the standard nvram size of 114 bytes. Steffen reported that hacking the nvram codes does not help too much since they seem to store some information into the 256 bytes used which have some time stamp - maybe the last flash time. Therefore running an md5sum against the 256 bytes will not tell you if the BIOS of two different machines are identically set.

Contacting SuperMicro yielded two possible solutions (with a response time of 30 minutes!!!):

- We tell SuperMicro our settings for every single setting possible and they will build an OEM BIOS version for us which we can flash to the system.

- They sent us a DOS executable which can read and write the settings. This however means we need to boot into a DOS environment to use it :(. The file needed can be retrieved here.