Just thought I would post a few things I have encountered with these motherboards. The reason I bought this board was because it had a mPCI-e slot for a mPCI-e SSD. If anyone is considering this board there are some things they should know about before they consider purchasing it.
First of all, these things have absolutely horrid BIOS/uEFI implementations. Early versions of the BIOS/uEFI BIOS did allow for successful booting via uEFI. intel in their infinite wisdom decided to "fix this" by making newer versions of the BIOS incapable of storing the proper NVRAM entries for a uEFI boot. In fact if you upgrade the BIOS, be prepared for all NVRAM uEFI entries to be lost rendering your installed OS unbootable. So if you want to boot uEFI, be prepared to stick with an older uEFI BIOS such as 0062 or older. But wait there is another "gotcha" with going that route. If you stick with an older BIOS there is a very strong possibility that some of your PCI-e cards will not work (such as tv tuners). intel has fixed that in the latest BIOS but still has uEFI issues.
Second, if you plan to use the the mPCI-e sata capabilities, do not plan on using it for a boot drive and another traditional drive for data. There is yet another bug in their BIOS that forces the system to try to boot to an installed conventional instead despite the BIOS/uEFI clearly being set to boot off the mPCIe SSD. The only way to boot to the SSD is to manually hit F10 to get the boot selection screen and select it there. This occurs on all versions of the BIOS post 0062 and it even occurs when the BIOS is set to traditional BIOS mode and uEFI disabled.
3rd if you plan on shutting down the system, you must use a kernel >= 3.5.2. These boards have a chipset bug in the USB 3 controller that causes the system to do a reboot instead of a shutdown. There is a patch available that can be backported on the LKM to fix this which can be backported to other kernels. It swishes the USB 3 ports first to ehci mode before shutting down. I have not seen however any distro that has backported the patch in their updates yet. The other workaround to it is to disable WOL in the BIOS (I know, I know, WTF does WOL have to do with USB 3 but it does work).
Overall, I thought going with an intel board might be worth it for a stable "reference" platform but this is by far, without doubt, the buggiest board I have come across ever. Contacting intel so far has been OK, and they do accept linux as a valid system to report bugs against which is a nice change but it is really starting to feel like dealing with wine bugs. They fix one thing and break another with their BIOS updates. Many of these issues are also present in the DH77DF. It's too bad, as I can't seem to find another motherboard to meet the criteria that I am looking for (mPCI-e slot, all PCI-e, mATX and an intel NIC). One other thing to note, the mPCI-e slot for the SSD on the intel board is multiplexed with one of the SATA II ports so don't expect SATA III SSD speeds from the mPCIe SSD.
Overall, I cannot recommend the newer Intel boards for use for linux until these BIOS bugs are sorted out.
PS: This is just not a defective board, 3 boards from different batches have been already tried.
First of all, these things have absolutely horrid BIOS/uEFI implementations. Early versions of the BIOS/uEFI BIOS did allow for successful booting via uEFI. intel in their infinite wisdom decided to "fix this" by making newer versions of the BIOS incapable of storing the proper NVRAM entries for a uEFI boot. In fact if you upgrade the BIOS, be prepared for all NVRAM uEFI entries to be lost rendering your installed OS unbootable. So if you want to boot uEFI, be prepared to stick with an older uEFI BIOS such as 0062 or older. But wait there is another "gotcha" with going that route. If you stick with an older BIOS there is a very strong possibility that some of your PCI-e cards will not work (such as tv tuners). intel has fixed that in the latest BIOS but still has uEFI issues.
Second, if you plan to use the the mPCI-e sata capabilities, do not plan on using it for a boot drive and another traditional drive for data. There is yet another bug in their BIOS that forces the system to try to boot to an installed conventional instead despite the BIOS/uEFI clearly being set to boot off the mPCIe SSD. The only way to boot to the SSD is to manually hit F10 to get the boot selection screen and select it there. This occurs on all versions of the BIOS post 0062 and it even occurs when the BIOS is set to traditional BIOS mode and uEFI disabled.
3rd if you plan on shutting down the system, you must use a kernel >= 3.5.2. These boards have a chipset bug in the USB 3 controller that causes the system to do a reboot instead of a shutdown. There is a patch available that can be backported on the LKM to fix this which can be backported to other kernels. It swishes the USB 3 ports first to ehci mode before shutting down. I have not seen however any distro that has backported the patch in their updates yet. The other workaround to it is to disable WOL in the BIOS (I know, I know, WTF does WOL have to do with USB 3 but it does work).
Overall, I thought going with an intel board might be worth it for a stable "reference" platform but this is by far, without doubt, the buggiest board I have come across ever. Contacting intel so far has been OK, and they do accept linux as a valid system to report bugs against which is a nice change but it is really starting to feel like dealing with wine bugs. They fix one thing and break another with their BIOS updates. Many of these issues are also present in the DH77DF. It's too bad, as I can't seem to find another motherboard to meet the criteria that I am looking for (mPCI-e slot, all PCI-e, mATX and an intel NIC). One other thing to note, the mPCI-e slot for the SSD on the intel board is multiplexed with one of the SATA II ports so don't expect SATA III SSD speeds from the mPCIe SSD.
Overall, I cannot recommend the newer Intel boards for use for linux until these BIOS bugs are sorted out.
PS: This is just not a defective board, 3 boards from different batches have been already tried.
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