Supermicro Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR / X13DEM Working Well For Dual Socket Xeon Max
Since 2008 I've tested Supermicro motherboards at Phoronix and they've always worked out well under Linux, though that shouldn't be too surprising especially with today's Linux server marketshare. In any event the Supermicro X13DEM & Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR presented no issues at all with the Linux distributions I've run with this board from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 23.04, AlmaLinux 9, Clear Linux, Arch Linux, and others. If you are running any major enterprise Linux distribution or any relatively recent Linux distribution release, you should be in good shape for enjoying the full capabilities of this Supermicro motherboard.
That's in part thanks to all of the great engineering resources Intel invests early on for the Linux kernel upstreaming of new processor features and all of their other investments they make into the Linux kernel, GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers, and other key open-source projects for ensuring their new CPU and platform features are ready to go at launch.
Still on my to-do list is investigating FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD support, among the other BSDs, on this platform and more broadly for Sapphire Rapids... Stay tuned for BSD testing there as time allows.
The Supermicro X13DEM motherboard features a standard AMI UEFI BIOS and BMC with Redfish API support and the other usual standard additions of Supermicro motherboards, including both HTML5 and Java console/KVM support.
In an ideal world I'd love to see Supermicro at least optionally support Coreboot and OpenBMC on their platforms, but alas we aren't there yet. At least we are seeing the industry moving in the direction of more customer interest in Coreboot / fully auditable system firmware, the new AMD openSIL initiative to eventually replace the proprietary AGESA, and other growing interest in open-source at lower levels of the system firmware in the name of security, auditing, and updatable functionality. Supermicro has confirmed at least they will be supporting OpenBMC and OCP OSF Open BIOS on some select Open Compute Project (OCP) products moving forward. Along with that it would also be great if more server vendors began supporting the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and Fwupd for easing the roll-out of firmware updates within running Linux environments.