Sipeed NanoKVM-PCIe

Re:Sipeed NanoKVM-PCIe by crest on Thursday December 26, 2024 @08:23AM (#42515040)

Is there a version with a three (or even four) port VLAN capable switch? One port for the BMC, one looped back into the normal NIC and one (or two) upstream ports? Of course it would require a full height PCI bracket, but it would be perfect for colocated servers (no additional space or power requirements) and maybe cheap enough for budget hosters to offer as a reasonably priced KVM option.

It would also be interesting to make the PCIe card a good enough NIC (please use an effectively universally supported chip) to avoid the loopback cables.

About 99% of the time I want console access I would vastly prefer a proper serial port (≥115200 baud, 8N1, hardware flow control and break condition). Make that and power control (status, on, off, warm reset, cold reset) available via SSH over WireGuard. If done well it requires a lot less bandwidth and is more snappy. While I'm wishing for things please add mosh too ;-).

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Re:Sipeed NanoKVM-PCIe by duskwuff on Thursday December 26, 2024 @05:17PM (#42518303)

For what it's worth, the "right" way to handle this is NCSI, which allows a management interface to piggyback on the host's NIC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NC-SI

Unfortunately, support for NCSI can't be added to most motherboards; it requires the NIC to support it.

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