ASUS Pro WS TRX50 Remote Access to BIOS and OS selection

[907rider]

I recently completed a build based on the ASUS Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI and an 7970X Threadripper. I am an Electrical Engineering grad student researcher and the computer lives on campus. Typically, if I am not on campus, I VPN in using my school provided laptop and run my actual code on the workstation.  All of my machine learning stuff has to be run in Linux, but there are a couple programs that I use that are only offered on Windows, and I don't game much anymore but when I do it's definitely on Windows. Therefore, I am running a dual-boot setup on the workstation. My issue is that if I am not on campus I cannot reboot the computer into whichever OS I want.

 

I know that the people have built/used Raspberry PI based KVM's to be able to reboot/control their workstations remotely. But does the ASUS Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI have some sort of similar functionality built in? I believe that ASUS offers an IPMI card that would allow this sort of functionality? If not, what are people doing in this scenario?

 

Also before someone suggests it, I have tried WSL2 and the performance is not just quite there for training large ML models. I saw about a 20% performance hit and loading in the small sample data of my test program took about 50x as long.

[m9x3mos]

Asus does sell an ipmi card but does not look like it is compatible with that motherboard. 

I have been using pikvm and that has been working great. You can build it on a stand along box or a form factor that will use a pcie bay in the case. 

I have this

https://www.amazon.com/Geekworm-KVM-A3-Raspberry-Compatible-Include/dp/B0B5R37TT3/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=Pikvm&qid=1706583786&sr=8-1

With a pi 4 8gb and have had zero issues with it. 

With that you can control the machine just like you were there just need to plug it into your outputs. 

[igormp]

14 hours ago, 907rider said:

If not, what are people doing in this scenario?

I believe you can go simpler without any KVM solution. Just have your systems be EFI and have linux be your default boot option in your bios.

 

From there, depending on the booloader you have, you can simply make your linux system reboot into Windows. See a systemd-boot example:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd-boot#Choosing_next_boot

 

Then you can just reboot your windows system and it should go back to linux by default.

[907rider]

23 hours ago, m9x3mos said:

Asus does sell an ipmi card but does not look like it is compatible with that motherboard. 

I have been using pikvm and that has been working great. You can build it on a stand along box or a form factor that will use a pcie bay in the case. 

I have this

https://www.amazon.com/Geekworm-KVM-A3-Raspberry-Compatible-Include/dp/B0B5R37TT3/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=Pikvm&qid=1706583786&sr=8-1

With a pi 4 8gb and have had zero issues with it. 

With that you can control the machine just like you were there just need to plug it into your outputs. 

 

Thank you for the input, I think I may end up going that route as I am away from campus for weeks at a time and being able to have complete control over the machine would be really nice.

 

 

12 hours ago, igormp said:

I believe you can go simpler without any KVM solution. Just have your systems be EFI and have linux be your default boot option in your bios.

 

From there, depending on the booloader you have, you can simply make your linux system reboot into Windows. See a systemd-boot example:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd-boot#Choosing_next_boot

 

Then you can just reboot your windows system and it should go back to linux by default.

 

 

I honestly did not know about that command! That is super handy. I will use that for now but I think in the future I may have to setup one of those Raspberry Pi KVM's.