What exactly does this do?
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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RISC-V
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RISC-V (pronounced "risk-five") is a license-free, modular, extensible instruction set architecture (ISA).
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Its an IP KVM
Huh, so you connect your display, mouse and keyboard to this thing, which is in a pcie slot of your current machine, and you can somehow switch it to every machine in your (local) network?
I guess you need a vnc server or something similar running on all hosts?
Not quite. You connect this to your network, then you can remotely connect to it and control the computer it’s attached to. This includes sending ACPI signals, accessing the BIOS, etc. so it’s as though you had physical access to the machine, only remotely.
Barring actually pressing buttons, of course.
This is inspired by PiKVM. https://pikvm.org/
Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks! Sounds really useful for those hard to reach machines. (This could have helped a lot during the CrowdStrike fiasco, I guess)
Indeed! My use case is so I can fix my home lab computers when I’m away.
The PCIe connection is only for supplying power to the device. This form factor.makes it easy to place it inside the Computer. Then you only need to connect HDMI and USB and you can remote control the connected device.
There is another version that is designed to sit outside the computer case already.
Oh, so it takes the HDMI signal from the computer as input, and it outputs USB keyboard/mouse events?
Yes. You can even mount files and images through USB.
I like it, will probably buy when they finish open sourcing the code
Bought it. (The external version). It’s bit buggy
What's the use case for PoE? If the mobo can't supply energy, there's not much you can do via this device, right? What have I missed?
The network port on the KVM will connect to a switch (which can provide PoE, potentially), not to the device it's managing.
Sure but if there's no power on the mobo, the device can't do anything. Even if it sends an ACPI on signal, there's no power. 🤷
Pretty sure you still connect the kvm card to the motherboard power button jumpers so you can power on the computer remotely. That's how the non-pcie version does it.
At least you would know that the KVM is responding even though the computer is not, so it's more likely a hardware issue than a network one