This is very interesting, but I'm a little lost. UART is serial. Are they trying to get a serial terminal set up with some chip on this motherboard? Wat does it let them do?

Funny to see this come back and see my write-up linked. I did this 8 years ago and think I was the first on this particular board (although others had done similar on other boards). I still have a pile of them sitting on my desk because I accidentally kept bricking them by being ... not careful. That said, even at the time this board was already old, so I guess it's positively prehistoric at this point. I eventually stopped working on this because I thought that others were making sufficient progress. It hasn't really fully materialized yet, but between openbmc, opensil, DC-SCM and the work the oxide folks are doing, I'm still hopeful that we'll get out of server firmware hell eventually.

What is the benefit of this?

Cool write up, but how in the world do they have Gerbers for a Supermicro motherboard?

Nice work. Getting at obscured firmware is the next best thing to open firmware. (Well, or firmware that's simply not there, if it's not open.)

I've had several Supermicro servers at home over the years, and I've kept the one that doesn't include the IPMI BMC. (You can see the unpopulated pads on the board where the Winbond(?) package was in a different variant of the server I had.) Fewer things to go wrong.