More problems with severe disk performance degradation, but SMART still shows the disc as ‘OK’.. This has now occurred three times over the last 2 years or so, with 1TB and 2TB disks that were around 4+ years old (in continuous use..).. The contents were still accessible, but data transfer was extremely slow – around 250KiB/s to … Continue reading →
I had spent far too much time trying to solve the Pi4 USB conundrum ( see https://rglinuxtech.com/?p=2922 ) but did recently find that the 5.14-rc kernels enabled the USB3 hub, although USB2 still failed to function. I then updated u-boot to the ‘latest’ version, and now everything (finally..) works as it should, again..: Updated u-boot to latest … Continue reading →
Recently acquired one of the Khadas VIM3-Pro arm64 SoCs, and was impressed with the level of documentation available.. Unfortunately – as is so often the case – this was all relentlessly Ubuntu-focussed, with a semi-proprietary kernel based on the 4.X kernel tree.. At least the U-Boot version was fairly recent, and appeared to support EFI etc.. The … Continue reading →
After more testing, it appears that there is still a problem with the Intel e1000e driver and some – but not all – supported NICs.. I have several ex-HP systems that have Intel NICs, and some have more than one. The HP Z820 has two (different models..): $ lspci |grep Eth 00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82579LM … Continue reading →
After updating my main HP Z820 system to Kernel 5.4, I found that the previous Intel e1000e Ethernet problem I had encountered on my test system with Kernel 5.4-rc6 seemed to have reappeared. (see http://rglinuxtech.com/?p=2632 ). But – this time, two of my systems with e1000e drivers were OK, but the third – the HP Z820 – … Continue reading →
Setting up an old HP8000 desktop small-form-factor system as a crash-and-burn test system, with dual-boot Fedora 29 and Windows 7, on separate drives. First slight gotcha with the Fedora install: The installation utility shows the two disks, the first of which has Windows 7 (sda) and the second – additional – was for the Fedora Linux install … Continue reading →
As part of my quest to test Linux on more obscure/historical hardware, and given that the theme was ‘HP’ after my perilous foray into the world of Linux on IA64, I have now acquired (eBay!) an ‘inexpensive’ PA-RISC system – HP 9000/785 C3700 – after upgrading from an older C3000, and adding some more up-to-date IO cards.. … Continue reading →
Apparently, there has been a major security defect discovered in Intel CPUs, and full details have been embargoed until early-January, but there is a comprehensive article in The Register, here: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/ The Linux Kernel devs have been working to provide a workaround, as – apparently – there is no other practical solution: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/4/709 The article does hint … Continue reading →
Many aeons ago, I used to have SCSI disks on my ancient Linux systems, but the only SCSI device I attached nowadays was the LTO Tape drive, for full system backups, very occasionally.. Now, I have the HP RX2600 IA64 system, with nothing but U320 SCSI LVD disks, and needed to find a way of attaching one … Continue reading →
Ever since I spent some considerable time promoting HP’s IA64 Linux systems, way back in the early-2000’s, I have always wanted one for myself, and I recently managed to acquire an RX2600 1U server for a very reasonable price, and beef it up with some inexpensive parts from eBay.. The spec – at the moment – is … Continue reading →