Marcin Juszkiewicz - amd64

AMD again

2019-11-13T10:27:00+01:00

My i7 based desktop was about 8 years old and it was time to replace it. As there was no affordable aarch64 desktop class solution I have decided to go with AMD.

Third generation of Ryzen processors brought several new features. Not that I care much of them. The important stuff is that they are faster than my Sandybridge i7. And that mainboards nowadays have m.2 slots so pcie-to-m.2 adapter cards are no longer needed.

Processor

Looked at performance and price of new AMD cpus and chosen Ryzen 5 3600. Fast enough and still quite cheap compared to next in line. And it has more cores/threads than my i7.

Stock cpu cooler is worthless junk as usual. Scythe Mugen 5 will replace it soon (ordered yesterday).

Mainboard

Next was mainboard. First I thought about buying one with B450 chipset but then decided to bump budget and get x570 one. PCI Express 4.0 support, two m.2 slots, usb 3.2 ports etc. Should serve well for another few years.

MSI X570-A Pro is what I went for. Nice black one, has all expansion slots I wanted. According to lspci there are 48 devices on my system (with graphics card inserted into PCIe slot and one NVME).

mainboard partially assembled

Memory

Ram was next. This time new platform did not meant doubling amount of memory. Went with 32GB as two 16GB sticks so there is space for expansion if there will be any need.

As with previous machines went with Kingston memory sticks. 3200MHz CL16 was proper balance between price and performance. Memtest86 told that they are fine (while looking funny on 34” panel).

memtest86 on 34” LCD

Old stuff

Rest of my setup is from previous system. Case, nvme, ssd, Geforce 1050 Ti graphics card. My desktop always reused something from previous one. I could replace SATA cables with black ones to keep one colour scheme but this way I know which cable is which device.

my underdesk desktop

There were some no long needed cards. Soundblaster Live, usb 3 controller or pcie-to-m.2 adapter card went into storage box. Who knows, maybe one day will land in some other system.

Issues

As with any new hardware there are some issues. Stock cpu cooler is crap as always. Getting cpu busy means lot of noise. Will solve that with Scythe Mugen 5.

Other problem is usb related. For some reason one of my hubs (Anker 4 port) does not detect hot plugging devices. Cold plugged ones (present at system boot) work fine. Something to look closer one day.

Why again?

My first PC machine had AMD Duron cpu. 600 MHz overclocked to 850. Then Athlon XP. Athlon 64. Athlon 64 X2. The last one probably still has a use from time to time…

Upgraded my desktop a bit

2019-05-25T22:53:00+02:00

I have built my current desktop 7.5 years ago. Since then I did not had a need for a big hardware changes.

Upgrades

Machine (called ‘puchatek‘ (Winnie the Pooh in Polish)) had several upgrades in meantime:

got maxxed at 32GB of memory
60GB Corsair SSD for / was installed 8 years ago
250GB Samsung Evo for /home was added 3 years ago
graphic cards were changed from Radeon HD5450 via Radeon R7 240 to Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti

Issues

Size of system drive became an issue when I needed to build hundreds of container images. All that Kolla stuff…

One of solutions was replacing system drive with bigger one. So I tried to use PCI Express to m.2 adapter card and realised that x8 slot stopped working.

New mainboard

It was a time to replace motherboard. And it is impossible to find a brand new one with 1155 socket. So I went through used ones and found nice replacement — Asrock Z68 Extreme4.

What’s nice in it? PLX chip. It is PCI Express switch. So mainboard can have x16/x8+x8 slots, x4 slot, some x1 slots and several onboard components despite of only 24 pcie lanes available (16 from cpu, 8 from chipset).

This way I can have graphics card working in x16 slot (it goes with x8 anyway) and NVME drive in x4 slot. If I decide to go into SLI (two graphics cards) or 10GbE I have a slot for it.

PCI tree

PCI tree looks a bit different now:

cpu
- x16 slot with graphics card
- x8 slot (empty)
chipset
- x4 slot with nvme
- x1 link to Marvell SATA controller (disabled in firmware setup)
- x1 link to Etron USB 3.0 host controller
- x1 link to Etron USB 3.0 host controller
- x1 link to PLX switch
PLX switch
- x1 slot with Renesas USB 3.0 host controller
- x1 link to FireWire controller (disabled in firmware setup)
- x1 link to Broadcom 1GbE controller
- x1 slot (empty, covered by graphics card)
- x1 link to PCIe to pci bridge
  - MOS 9845 Multi I/O controller with 6 serial ports
  - PCI slot (empty)

Hacking firmware

Latest available firmware was from 2012 and lacked any support for NVME boot. Thanks to other hackers it was not an issue. Only had to follow “how to add NVME booting into BIOS” instruction. After flashing modified firmware I could boot directly from NVME drive.

Final result

System boots from NVME now. 256GB of fast storage available for / and my container images. Spare PCIe x8 slot for future upgrades.

Linaro Connect: interesting hardware

2016-10-11T11:06:00+02:00

Before going for Linaro Connect I had a plan to look at all those 96boards devices and write some complains/opinions about them. But it would be like shooting fish in a barrel so I decided against. But there were some interesting pieces of hardware there.

One of them was Macchiatobin board from SolidRun. I think that this is same as their Armada 8040 community board but after design changes. Standard Mini-ITX format, quad core Cortex-A72 cpu (with upto 2GHz clock), one normal DIMM slot (max 16GB, ships with 4GB), three Serial-ATA ports, PCI-Express x4 slot, one USB 3.0 port, microSD slot.

UPDATE: SolidRun confirmed - this is final design of their Armada 8040 community board.

Photo (done by Riku Voipio) shows which goodies are available:

Armada 8040 community board

Network interfaces from top to bottom are (if I remember correctly):

10GbE (SFP + RJ-45)
10GbE (SFP + RJ-45)
2.5GbE (SFP)
1GbE (RJ-45)

When it comes to software I was told that board is SBSA compliant so any normal distribution should work. Kernel, bootloaders (U-Boot and UEFI) are mainlined.

Price? 350USD. Looks like nice candidate for AArch64 development platform or NAS.

Other device was Gumstix Nodana 96BCE board which is 96boards compliant carrierboard for Intel Joule modules.

On top it looks like typical 96boards device (except USB C port):

Gumstix Nodana top view

But once reversed Intel Joule module is visible:

Gumstix Nodana bottom view

This is first non-ARM based 96boards device. Maybe even one of most compliant ones. At least from software perspective because when it comes to hardware then module makes it a bit too thick to fit in 96boards CE specification limits.

Note that 96boards Consumer Electronics specification does not require using ARM or AArch64 cpu.

Scythe Mugen 2 and socket 1155 mainboard

2012-01-06T09:51:00+01:00

When I moved my home machine to i7-2600K I realized out that Scythe Mugen 2 cpu cooler which I was using lacks elements to mount it on socket 1555 motherboard.

I looked at shops and found out that I need SCCSMG2-1156 (Scythe Mugen 2 mounting kit for Socket 1156/1155) as I have quite old version of cooler (then there was Rev. B released with support for all socket types). But then problem started — no one in Poland had them…

So I contacted Scythe directly and later after spending 10€ I got mounting kit delivered at Xmas Eve. Took me some days to find time to mount it.

First attempt ended with lot of curses, angry email to Scythe and stock cooler mounted again.

But I decided to not give up. Did some extra research and found this YouTube video where I saw that I mounted bolt screws wrong…

So I did another try. This time it fitted perfectly and I can enjoy silence.

Next step: replace new case fans with more quiet ones.

I feel the power of i7

2011-12-15T14:13:00+01:00

Lot of time passed since last time I upgraded my home computer. Yesterday I moved from P35 based mainboard and Core2Quad cpu to P67 and i7-2600K processor. And 16GB of memory.

Main reason for change was memory. Building packages on SSD is nice and fast but I hate how system slows down when 3-4GB of data needs to be removed from drive. With 8GB of memory it was hard to fit pbuilder’s instance and all running applications. And P35 based mainboards do not support more than 8GB ;( Why I did not buy P45 based mainboard… They supported 4x4GB setup…

So I checked what is on a market. Then I waited months for AMD to release Bulldozer processors. Finally they did just to show that it was waste of time.

Current PC market sucks. Shops do not know what they sell, you need to go to vendors websites for every information. Intel Sandy Bridge platform has very limited amount of PCI Express lines which means that you can not have more than one x16 slot. But shops look at board and write “two/three/../seven x16 PCIe slots” — never mind that it is one of:

x16 + x8
x16 + x4
x16 + x8 + x4
x16 + x4 + x4

And in most configurations x16 degrades to x8 when second slot in use as you need PCI Express switch like NVidia NF200 to “provide” more lanes to get two x16 slots.

And fun goes even more when you look at those ‘three x16 slots’ mobos:

The PCIEX4 slot shares bandwidth with the PCIEX1_1 and PCIEX1_2 slots. When the PCIEX1_1 slot or the PCIEX1_2 slot is populated with an expansion card, the PCIEX4 slot will operate at up to x1 mode.

I remember board where using such x4 slot killed Serial ATA controller…

So, after long reading of all those specifications, reviews, I selected Gigabyte P67X-UD3-B3 mainboard. P67 chipset is not newest one but I do not plan to use on board graphics. I have x16 + x8 PCI Express slots (working as x8+x8 when both in use), USB 3.0 ports, firewire (which I never used), 8 Serial ATA ports (4x 6Gbps and 4x 3Gbps ones) and possibility to have 32GB of DDR3 RAM (but this has to wait for cheap 8GB sticks).

I did one speed test today: tmpfs based build of my cross toolchain packages for Ubuntu. Took one hour for armel and armhf ones. Very nice :)

ATI onboard strikes back

2008-06-12T12:02:00+02:00

As we plan to move from Poznań to Szczecin this week we are spending at Ania’s parents house.

To have better work equipment then my Dell D400 laptop I grabbed some unused components from home to build computer. The list was not so long:

120GB ATA hard disk (it was system one some time ago)
DFI RS482 mainboard with 2.1GB ram and Athlon64 X2 cpu (my previous desktop)
cpu cooler
keyboard
PS/2 mouse (which I used before buying wireless one)
power supply
USB->Serial adapter and some other USB gadgets
some cables
headphones

The only thing which was needed to make it computer was case. And this shown that Szczecin lacks good computer shops — I had to visit 4 of them just to buy decent case as most of time they only had cheap ones.

Anyway I am using this machine for few days now (connected to old 17” CRT which I used in 2006) with on-board ATI graphics card. It has many names… “RS485, ATI Radeon x1250 Chipset” etc… And this is crap never mind which drivers are used ;(

First I started with “xf86-video-ati” one. Version shipped in Debian ‘sid’ (6.8.0) is very old and reports that I have the same monitor connected to VGA and DVI outputs. Result is not funny. Driver from “experimental” is much better. But 1024x768@85Hz resolution which is default is not so nice — 1280x1024@85Hz is much better but needs to be set by XRandR call or tweaking of X11 config file.

So I tried to use official ATI driver: “fglrx”. As usual it required patching to build with last release kernel (2.6.25) but patches are already in Debian so it took less time then my last fight with NVidia driver. Effect is also strange — this time monitor started in 2048x1536@60Hz which is just insane on 17” CRT. After switching with XRandR to sane 1280x1024@85Hz it is much more usable.

Good side is that I do not need to use this machine too often so it will stay like it is for some time. When we move it will be one of my build machines.

And if I ever will have to use it I will put NVidia card into this — they at least works perfect in X11.

CPU cooler upgrade

2007-11-07T23:05:00+01:00

As you probably noticed I upgraded CPU in my desktop machine. But cpu cooler was same as before — stock Athlon64 BOX one which was included with previous A64 3200+ processor.

During idle cpu was running on 1GHz speed (thanks to cpufreq governor “ondemand”) and had 37-39°C temperature. Under load (such as OE/Poky builds) it was up to 65°C and after some time overheating check switched frequency to 1GHz…

Now with Akasa AK-876 heatsink this machine has 30-32°C when idle and 46-50°C under load. And fan speed is much lower — keeps under 2000 RPM under load (previous one goes up to 4000 RPM) so machine is usable without listening music.

There was some problems with fitting such big heatsink into case but it sits properly in place and air flow is in proper way — from CPU fan -> CPU heatsink -> case fan -> out. It also shows that my next machine will get new case — Codegen 9002 which I use now starts to be too small to keep all drives, fans and cables in good order.

CPU upgrade

2007-11-02T18:23:00+01:00

I usually did big computer upgrades (AMD Duron with SDRAM -> AMD Athlon with DDR, then to AMD Athlon64 with DDR) but this time it was only CPU. From Athlon64 3200+ (2GHz) I switched to Athlon64 X2 4200+ (2.2GHz). Operation was quite simple — take one CPU, insert another but old one glued to radiator so I had to use some force :(

Then first boot and question… will BIOS recognize new CPU or not. It properly displayed information and then Linux started — just to show me 1 CPU. Quick installation of already prepared SMP kernel and /proc/cpuinfo had more informations.

Machine is quite loud when operating on full speed but most of time CPUFreq is able to lower frequency (1.0/1.8/2.0/2.2GHz steps are available) so it is noiseless. It is nice to see how CPU usage is split into two cores — now I do not have to wait when two builds are progressing and I want to run some applications.

Now doing builds will be more comfortable :)