Tested PCIe cards and output

[kram0000]

Hi all, I really want to love this little board but I just can't.  Not being able to use my Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 is nearly a dealbreaker, and I do not have serial capability.  Strangest behavior is that all the cards but the Supermicro would boot the rockpro, even if they don't seem to be supported.  Supermicro just sits with a blinking cursor on the screen and no reaction to anything.

Anyways, I plugged in every PCIe addon card I had and took some dmesg and lspci logs.  Maybe someone here can figure out things for others.

Can't post it on here so I'll put it on pastebin raw format.

EVGA geforce GT 730 P/N 01G-P3-2730-KR dmesg

PNY Nvidia Quadro K620 VCQK620-T dmesg
PNY Nvidia Quadro lspci -vvv

LSI SAS 9271-4i dmesg
LSI lspci -vvv

Asus Hyper M.2 X4 dmesg

Asus USB 3.1 2-port card dmesg
Asus USB lspci

[Nikolay_Po]

Hi! Probably, your card requires BIOS support which is impossible with this SBC. For the chip your card used there should be Marvell BIOS support, like I see in different product user manual.

The cards which doesn't use dedicated BIOS support should work.

Also if you have spare hardware, you can try to insert the card into PCIe slot while the SBC is running, make a hotplug. If the hardware will not blow-up, probably you will got more information in kernel log.

[kram0000]

Thanks for the reply.  I don't agree with what you're saying because this card does not have RAID capability (one of the reasons I bought it).  Here is the link to the manufacturer's page of the card.  The information you found is specific to the Marvell 6480 controller where the card in question has a Marvell 9480.  Not trying to nit-pick here but sometimes the devil is in the details, and I admit I could be completely wrong.
Anyways, I just got a serial adapter in the mail so I'll try seeing what all the fuss is about with this card.

[Nikolay_Po]

Agree with you now. Looking into serial output right after power-on is a good place to start. The adapter needs to be setup for 1.5MBaud speed.

[kram0000]

Will start a new thread for the serial output of this card.

[xalius]

If your PCIe card contains an option ROM or similar with x86 code to run on startup, that's usually a dealbreaker, unless your card vendor has option ROM firmware that runs on ARM