What a horrible thing to do without extremely extensive research and equipment at hand.
Maybe, or you might break IPMI altogether in the process.
Agreed about research. Equipment is 'just' an external flasher and clip, but using it isn't exactly painless.
IPMI should be impossible to break via a bios update, no matter how corrupted (in theory). It runs on a external processor, has it's own RAM, has direct access to network hardware and can flash the bios independently. AFAIK it still works even if the bios chip is physically removed, there is no processor and no RAM installed. You would need an activation key from supermicro however, but I believe they give out 'free trials' for those.
Still, even if things go wrong supermicro has a pretty robust built-in bios recovery process via a backup bios boot sector, and me_cleaner doesn't modify that part of the bios.
For sure some some features would be lost like intel node manager, power capping, sgx capability, etc, but that is very seldom used outside large datacenters anyway. The most likely feature useful that can be lost is monitoring some sensors, but ipmi should handle the majority of them.
Removing it is probably not worth the effort, but I sure would feel better considering the number of ME bugs coming out recently. Let's put a totally closed and non-auditable component built-in into every processor, that runs even when the computer is turned off, has independent network access capabilities and runs on a higher privilege level than any other component, what a great idea...
