Solved ASUS reboot issue

B

bisi

We have long been using ASUS CSM motherboards to build light-duty, inexpensive, very reliable backup servers. Essentially freebsd with a raidz-2 array to support esxi backups, via NFS, rsnapshots and other duties as assigned. We just boot to console.

We recently (end of 2017) ran into a bump with this pattern. Select current ASUS boards ( ASUS H110M-A/M.2, H110M-C/CSM, B250M-C/CSM, H270M-Plus/CSM, Z370-I) running various intel CPUs, fail to reboot or shutdown gracefully with both freeBSD 10.4 and 11.1

Earlier ASUS boards (like and B85M-G R2.0 and Gigabyte GA-Z97X-SLI) work fine. We have tested with a wide range of CPUs available (thanks to a supportive local reseller).

The commands in question are REBOOT, AND SHUTDOWN -H. The reboot is critical, since we manage these machines from off-premises.

So -- I now need to find a board to use, as a client needs a new server sharpish. I'd prefer ASUS, needs 6 x SATA III ports (with full 6 gbps bandwidth each), compatible Gbps ethernet port, preferably VGA output.

Any recommendations?
 
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bisi said:
We recently (end of 2017) ran into a bump with this pattern. Select current ASUS boards ( ASUS H110M-A/M.2, H110M-C/CSM, and H270M-Plus/CSM, Z370-I) running various intel CPUs, fail to reboot or shutdown gracefully with both freeBSD 10.4 and 11.1

.......

Any recommendations?
Click to expand...

I'm wondering if any of the users in here discovered the issue too, and determined root cause and was able to correct it; say bios change or update for example.
 
Chipper8827 said:
Try Super micro
Click to expand...
A while ago I found only two boards at supermicro listed as tested: X11SPG-TF and X11SPL-F

From my very-supportive local vendor:
1/ Supermicro X11SPG-TF: https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C620/X11SPG-TF.cfm
* Cannot find any Canadian distributors that have this model in their SKU.

2/ Supermicro X11SPL-F: https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C620/X11SPL-F.cfm
* VPN: MBD-X11SPL-F-B (Brown Box) / MBD-X11SPL-F-O (Retail Box) …SRP $495 / Special Order, about 2 weeks to get

So, really hard to get in Victoria BC, WAY outside the "inexpensive" category, and impossible to RMA.

If you have experience with desktop boards that would fit in a 14" tower and use an I5 with all the other bits mentioned, plus availability on newegg.ca (note the .ca), then I'd really like to hear about it.
 
well, while not a perfect solution, we have a good-enough one -- we have built 11.1-RELEASE on an ASUS TUF Z370 PLUS board, and it behaves as desired.

We tested the drive from the earlier, failing CSM boards (which had a 10.4-RELEASE install) in the same box, and it mis-behaved (reboot and poweroff hung at the same point -- showing the uptime). We *did* use a workaround in the production machines. We disabled the the reboot command ( mv reboot reboot-borked, and made a bash alias (we use bash shell) alias reboot='shutdown -r now'. (stuck it in the system-wide bashrc file). This results a whole bunch of ACPI error messages after the normal hang-point, flashing by in less than a second. Our ever-helpful system builder managed to catch this on a video, so we could slow it down to human-readable speed.

doing freebsd-update -r 11.1-RELEASE upgrade successfully upgraded the 10.4 to a fully-functional 11.1 and (helpfully) replaced the reboot command (I did remember to remove the alias).

The only downside: the gaming motherboard lacks a VGA port to match the tiny server-closet vga monitors we use.
 
I get this problem too with the asus_prime_h270m_plus. I haven't found a solution yet. 10.3 was rock solid, going to 10.4 the system seems unstable in various ways. Tried the latest bios: PRIME-H270M-PLUS-ASUS-1006.zip
 
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