Sipeed NanoKVM-PCIe

Worth mentioning Sophgo (CPU maker here) just got added to US Sanction list for helping China dodge semiconductor sanctions.

Apparently it's the Bitmain cryptominer folk? Nice context from Tom's.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Looks like the pcie slot is just used for power?

I'd love to see something like this where the board had a basic video card, so you could use it in a system without any video output. Bonus if it also had a usb controller and a serial port, so it didn't need to loop to plugs (although some of that could happen on the internal side as well)

One the one hand adding radios (WiFi, LTe) to KVM over IP device sounds tempting on the other hand given the track record of KVM over IP devices it sound terrifying to give them the ability of bypass points of policy enforcement.

So have they released a kernel yet, or nah?

Their updater for the standalone unit has all sorts of bug reports.

I cannot figure out how these manufacturers can produce such nice hardware and such horrible software. And repeatedly, repeatedly miss the mark on understanding how important kernel/OSS releases are.

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 ;-).

I have the standalone unit and other than the painfully slow 100mbit Ethernet that's too slow to upload ISOs and which also doesn't work with many modern switches - it's really nice for the price.

The problem with a pcie one for me is that modern motherboards suffer from having hardly any PCIe ports - and when they do they're mashed in close to each other essentially making one useless if you have a decent GPU.

From the article “It would be laughable to argue the low-end SG2002 AI SoC poses a threat to any country…”

I can see a great deal of trouble capable of coming from a networked device capable of watching the screens 24x7 and potentially intercepting passwords being entered. And those are the legitimate functions for this device. Wouldn’t take much to throw a reverse shell for external access if you wanted to be particularly nefarious.

Not saying there’s any evidence this kvm is malicious. But I probably wouldn’t put it in anything more than one of my toy home lab servers.

Are there feasible open alternatives to this closed-source blob? The fundamental capabilities seem nice, on paper.

Also, is there Windows / Mac compatibility?

This is a great device but I can't imagine giving so much power and control to a closed-source, self-updating device.

Don't buy. Their standalone hardware unit has lots of hardware ground issues.

Sounds like a cheap Risc V general purpose SBC with USB and video!

Dumb question maybe, but what does this thing do?

Edit - ChatGPT to the rescue:

> KVM over IP (Keyboard, Video, Mouse over Internet Protocol) is a hardware solution that allows administrators to remotely access and manage servers and other devices at the BIOS level, even when the operating system is not running. It provides complete remote control, enabling tasks like system reboots, troubleshooting, and OS installations as if you were physically present with the machine.