I’ve been thinking about moving my Ampere host from its home in the basement to my home office. However, all the prior cards that I have and tried were not supported for BIOS display output (nVidia T400, RTX 2080 (EVGA… R.I.P.), Intel A750, RX 6950XT), so I figured at this point I’d just pick up something else. Going off System76’s build options, they are all Quadro or Professional series cards, which I’m not completely against, just not what I need.
If I were leaning this way, I would consider an A400, but ideally, I’d like something along the lines of a 4060 Ti or 5060 Ti with the 16 GB framebuffer for some of the smaller LLMs I use, like DeepSeek.
Currently, I use CPU interference,e but it also runs some VMs and pods, one of my main ones is an internal gitlab that I was hosting and decided to move too GitLab.com instead, so a runner is pretty much what is still running on this, along with a few KVM instances for K8S.
I just received my PNY RTX A400 (following the System76 options, starting with budget first) and it doesn’t have any output with POST. I’m going to reset the settings to default through IPMI and see if that works.
I’ve reset the BIOS and BMC (Just for completeness, not that I thought it would do anything), also tried the A400 in each slot, repeating the process, and still nothing as far as POST messages of any kind. Running lspci shows that the card is present in the system, blacklisted the nouveau drivers, and installed the proprietary nvidia driver (570.153.02). I installed X, and only then can I see anything outputting from that card, but that is in the OS, and even though that is what I want in the end and I could get that to work with other cards, It still seems that it can’t get output of POST messages to a PCIe graphics card.
It’s nice to have CUDA but that isn’t getting me exactly what I wanted since I was hopeful with a newer GPU that it would work as expected. Though, I wonder if there is anything else that I should be looking at like disabling BMC?
Not sure what System76 is doing but the nvidia cards don’t have an UEFI graphics driver in their ROM for aarch64, only for x86. That’s why you don’t get UEFI boot messages. Some aarch64 UEFI’s have an x86 emulator that will load x86 UEFI drivers including from option ROMs, maybe System76 is doing that in their UEFI. The ASrock ALTRA8UD8 doesn’t have an x86 emulator in their UEFI. I have asked their support to add it a year ago but so far they haven’t. If you search here we have had several discussions about this over the past year that may or may not be helpful for you.
Ironically, the modern AMD GPU’s have an aarch64 UEFI driver in option ROM, but the Ampere Altra broken PCIe controller requires hacky kernel workarounds and in general isn’t consistently reliable to behave in a stable way in linux. Nvidia on the other hand doesn’t have aarch64 option ROM but has consistently reliable OS drivers on aarch64 without hacky kernel patches.
Well, that is unfortunate, but I used this as an excuse to return the RTX A400 to get an RTX 4000. Because 4000 is better-er-er than 400. I’m going to continue to use this as a container and VM host for the time being. I think I just wanted to get on conference calls and show off the hardware.
