Quick Tip - Updating Firmware on Minisforum MS-A2

I recently had to setup a couple more Minisforum MS-A2 which will be used to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 for a special VMUG event at Broadcom's Palo Alto headquarters this week.

One of the first things I like to do with any new hardware system is to check the vendors website to make sure that I am running the latest firmware and drivers. I know many of you in the VMware Community have acquired the popular MS-A2 for VCF 9, so this is a good reminder to make sure your firmware is up to date!

My MS-A2 kits all shipped with the 1.0.1 version of the firmware and as of publishing this blog post, the latest version is 1.0.2. While reading the release notes for 1.0.2, I saw that one of the new feature is the ability to control the fan speeds, which was really the only negative feedback I had in my MS-A2 review, that fans were quite loud when any load was placed on the system.

Spoiler alert ... changing the fan speed to either balance and/or quiet did not make a difference 🤣 ... so YMMV with this new feature 😅

Step 1 - Download the latest MS-A2 Firmware (1.0.2) from the Minisforum support page and extract the contents from the 7z file which will be placed on USB device for flashing.

Step 2 - You will need a USB device that is formatted with FAT32, I typically use macOS, so I simply use the following command (replace it with your disk ID):

diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk4 1 MBRFormat "MS-DOS" BIOS R

Once the USB device has been formatted, copy all the files onto the USB device.

Step 3 - Before we can boot from the USB device to update the MS-A2 firmware, we need to first disable Secure Boot from the BIOS by going to Settings->Security->Secure Boot

Step 4 - Plug in the USB device and power on the MS-A2 and then launch the UEFI Shell

Step 5 - Once the UEFI Shell boots, you will need to access the partition of the USB device containing the firmware files, this will typically be fs0: but if you have already installed ESXi, then you may need to iterate through the numbers until you find your USB device.

To do so, you will type fsX: where X is a number starting from 0 and then do a dir listing. If not, continue to iterate until you find your USB device and in my example, it was fs3:

Step 6 - To start the firmware update, run the EfiFlash.nsh command and wait until the system reboots

Step 7 - An unfortunate behavior of updating the firmware on the MS-A2 and potentially on other Minisforum systems is that all BIOS configurations are restored to their system defaults. This means if you made any customizations, you will need to re-apply those settings.

This is also why it is typically recommended to update your firmware to the latest release before using your system.

Here are a few configuration settings I am using with the MS-A2

• Since the MS-A2 does NOT have compatible TPM chip with ESXi, you can get rid of the pesky warning by disabling Trusted Computing and Secure Boot
  • Advanced->Trusted Computing
  • Security->Secure Boot
  • Advanced->AMD Overclocking->Precision Boost Override - CPU Boost Override->Enabled (Negative)->Max Boost-> 500 (per reader this is supposed to help with fan speeds but I have not observed the same)
  • Advanced->Hardware Monitor->Fan Mode->Auto
  • Advanced->AMD CBS->SMU Common Options->TjMAX->78 (Huge thanks to Chris West's resource on temperature fix)
• I typically install ESXi from USB, so to ensure that after installation, it will boot from the NVMe device (assuming that is your desired configuration), I like to set the second boot order to USB, so that after installation, it will not boot into USB device again, which I had learned the hard way as the installation kept re-installing itself as I was performing an automated Kickstart installation via USB