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AMD X2, Abit nVidia 570, OCZ 4GB

iMac — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 14:48:23 +0000

After struggling with growing CPU and I/O bandwidth requirements on my infrastructure, I finally made the jump to 64bit. A quick <$600 upgrade was not without its interesting issues.

A few interesting notes:

The Abit KN9 mobo requires me to override my default RAM voltage, and set it manually to 2.0V - Something that was conveniently included on a small note in my box - possibly put there by my reliable vendor, Premier Computer. (www.pccanada.com)
Without this little tweak, memory corruption on default settings didn’t even allow the system to boot. A sort of scary experience after assembling all the hardware.

Even after overcoming this, there was apparent instability running the Xen Hypervisor - strange messages similar to “Invalid CPU Instruction [SMP] CPU 0″ followed by kernel oops and general instability. Turns out a BIOS upgrade solved this - “Wheew”. A notable line in the Abit changelog is “Improved Linux Compatibility”.

In the end I have replaced my Pentium 2.0GHz with 1.5GB of PC133, with a Dual Core X2 4600 @ 2.4 GHz with 4GB of PC6400 OCZ Vista Series. The Xen 64bit PV guests boot in around seven seconds, including the slow MTA start. A fully virtualized 32bit HVM guest running Etch was required to handle the old Xen PV 32bit guests from the old hardware. Until Xen 3.1 is packaged, you can not run 32bit PV guest on a 64bit host/Dom0. The slower 32bit HVM is still much faster than the older system. The additional RAM gives plenty more room to each of the virtualized systems, Web, Mail, DNS, SQL, VPN and Media. Everything but the Media server will eventually become 64bit PV, until TwonkyVision add a 64bit binary to their list of architectures. Fast and Stable Hardware Virtualization for less than $600. Awesome what you can do for the the average small business with no software costs whatsoever. Debian stable packages make day-to-day management effortless, allowing the average enthusiast to focus on continued integration.

Constantly running the latest Debian stable environment, this recent 32bit- to 64it change will mark the first time I have ever “Re-installed’ my OS since originally deploying Debian Potato as my Internet gateway in 2001/2002.

Over the years, thanks to Debian, I have had time to add many new services to the basic mail and web infrastructure. With the addition of Xen, all the physically separate boxes merged into one piece of hot iron. Creating a new “LDAP” server, and a new “SVN” server, and testing out migrations to PowerDNS, Apache2, and leveraging OpenSWAN and OpenVPN all became trivial experiments that did not impact production services or incur any hardware costs, with the help of Xen.

Xen 3.x on a Debian stable system, supported by HP is certainly a winning combination we would love to help any leading edge and technology dependent business take advantage of.

SI 3114 and 750GB Drives

iMac — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 04:20:19 +0000

Recently purchased a new 750GB SATA drive and a nice Vantec Nexstar 3 enclosure with the eSata interface, allowing up to 3.0Gbps transfer rates. (Only 1.5Gbps on PCI SATA)

Plugged it into a new SI3114 based PCI card. Interestingly the Linux kernel (stock 2.6.18) seemed to handle a power-up of the 750GB drive without any problem when the system was already running, however the 5.0.32 firmware it shipped with would freeze when the drive had power during the BIOS post. The common problem was easily resolved by downloading a firmware upgrade from Silicon Image and upgrading to the 5.4 series BIOS.

After building the FreeDOS bootdisk as recommended in the README, entering the command updflash r5314.bin fixed everything.

Debian 2.6.18-4-xen-k7 Extinct

iMac — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 17:23:10 +0000

Up until recently, Debian users needed to understand various chip-specific flavours within each architecture. For instance -486, -k7, -k7-smp, -686, -686-smp, etc. were all under the i386 architecture (The 32bit AMD/Intel compatible architecture) and -amd64-k8, -amd64-k8-smp, em64t-p4, etc. were all under the amd64 architecture (The 64bit AMD/Intel architecture).

Recently the chip specific versions have been merging to common binary images with module component for chip-specific hardware and smp options. One binary flavour, the -k7, still exists separately suggesting some optimizations require separate binaries and cannot be rolled up into a common binary package.

This was fine until recently there was no longer an AMD-K7 specific flavour of the Debian Xen Linux System. For now, it appears all current 32bit AMD/Intel processors should run on the ‘686′ flavour and all current AMD/Intel 64bit processors continue to run on the ‘amd64′ flavour. Why there is not a transitional package, used to map the K7 upgrades to the 686 binaries must be due to the focus on Etch release. Since there is no Xen-K7 in Sarge, official transition is not required. Unfortunately for Debian K7 users, Xen has been stable and available for some time and many Etch deployments will face the unofficial manual transition from -k7 to -686. In any event, the lack of communication on this as indicated in Bug 405187 is a bit unusual. One interesting note is that linux-image-2.6-k7 is alive and well, suggesting it is no easy task to merge xen-linux-686 with the linux-image-k7 optimizations. For now, an AthlonXP user will have a -k7 image for non-xen usage, and a -686 image for xen usage. It just does not seem to be sound logic. Certainly it should all be resolved for the Etch release.

Windows on Xen HVM on HP Pavillion dv9000z

iMac — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 18:26:14 +0000

It all seems to be working great now. Running Debian default packages and kernels with iommu=off, I used QEMU to run the installer for WinXP and Win2K3. With Xen, both installers seemed to get hung-up at “Setup is Starting…” or thereabouts. In XP, once, I was able to see the F5 menu (only two options in XP) before it hung (still utilizing CPU). In Win2K3 I could never get to the F5 menu leaving me at “Setup is Starting” screen with CPU still being utilized. Using QEMU to get through until the first reboot worked great, and allowed me to proceed to boot using Xen for the subsequent installation process. Both OSes are now up and running, and surprising fast and responsive running on qemu qcow disk images under Xen. Time to test out Solaris, Nexenta and others, and fool around with Suspend/Resume.

Xen Linux on HP Pavillion Laptop w/ Turion X2

iMac — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 02:23:31 +0000

After a bit of research, and a hot tip on iommu=off, I am now running Xen on my dv9000z, which is exactly what I spec’d it to do. Read more here.

SIIG, Sunix - Initio Chipset coming to Linux

iMac — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 19:34:28 +0000

Yesterday, I was digging around for a quick SATA controller to get a new 500GB disk online. The requirement was short term so I jumped on a $40CAD SIIG SATA-II controller at the computer shop (OTA) next to my office. The cheapest option for $30CAD was a SATA-I SiG Chipset, but $10CAD more for the SATA-II/NCQ capability seemed ok, and I was anxious after having no luck with the $15CAD HW-629 IDE-SATA adapter. For all the time consumed so far, I would have been happy to just pay $60CAD for a high-end Promise controller. The sticker on the SIIG chipset was the first sign of trouble. A couple of old threads suggesting no Linux support for Initio Corporation 1622/1623 devices (as discovered by lspci) confirmed the worst. Then, I found this new thread discussing recent linux support. There may be hope yet for anyone else with one of these Initio 162x SATA controllers mad by Sunix, SIIG and others.

iPhone looks promising for Linux

iMac — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 21:16:44 +0000

I hope to find myself running Debian on one of these someday soon. I have yet to see the hardware specs, however today I know of no other OS X capable device that does not run Linux well. My fingers are crossed as I wait to see what the first ones look like on the inside. Running a VOIP client on the Toronto Wifi network could certainly be one way to claw back at the increasing incremental cost of mobile phone technology. Stretch your imagination to include a V4L device, a vlc server and client, a vpn client running on another small device, and voila, the home theatre goes mobile. Native OSX could probably handle this just fine also - Just no fancy package management.

Some Real Data from my DSPAM Stats Engine

iMac — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 16:33:18 +0000

Well, I get a fair bit of mail these days. Some can attest that my response to personal email can be at times, a bit slow. Thank goodness for DSPAM. I use a variety of e-mail clients (Linux-Evolution, Windows-Outlook, OSX-SeaMonkey, etc.) so having great spam filtering on the server, and NOT on the email client is very important to me. Since DSPAM provides a nice GUI for analysis of spam, I thought I would share with you my experience to date. Here are my stats, noting that more than 3/4 of my mail is spam, and accuracy on delivery is over 97%, which is quite manageable. Not bad for free, and without a team reviewing emails for me. I might say it is great. A must for anyone who wants to publish their email address without fear of spammers.

KVM, Options for AMD-V and Intel VT

iMac — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 19:19:31 +0000

Thanks to a colleague, I found a nice informative link on Virtualization. Trying to resolve ACPI on my new laptop, I recently stumbled on the 2.6.20-rc2 kernel option for KVM and assumed it to be some new piece my Xen hypervisor could take advantage of (once I get the ACPI issues resolved). Instead, I have just learned that it provides native kernel virtualization, such that you can just boot your favorite ISO (Windows, Solaris, OSX, Linux) and go. Seems easy enough I will try out the Deban instructions tonight as shown on kvm.sourceforge.net. The first step is only apt-get install kvm if you already have a 2.6.20-rc2 or greater kernel.

To install and run kvm on Debian, follow these steps:

Run the commands:
apt-get install kvm apt-get install kvm-source
m-a build kvm
m-a install kvm
modprobe kvm

Create a disk image:
qemu-img create -f qcow vdisk.img 10G

Install an operating system:
kvm -hda vdisk.img -cdrom /path/to/boot-media.iso -boot d -m 384If you’re installing Windows, add the -no-acpi flag.

After installation is complete, run it with:
kvm -hda vdisk.img -boot c -m 384

Note, the mm series of the current kernel (2.6.20-rc4-mm1) has quite a few KVM updates.

Christmas is here… Linux on HP dv9000z

iMac — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 20:47:47 +0000

Hit the dv9000z page for the latest…

Well, my Mac G3 Pismo (500Mhz/768MB PPC) has been a true warrior. I picked mine up second hand a few years back from a close friend whose company was upgrading to G4s. Running Debian on it has been great, though recently I find myself wanting to run Xen, browse YouTube (requires i386 libflash) and running out of battery (power adapter internal contacts require manual bending nearly ever other time I plug it in now). Today I am posting from my new dv9000z running Debian Sid. The only gamble was the Broadcom Wifi, which turned out to be a breeze, albeit with the clunky ndiswrapper. A quick overview of the features:

WSXGA+ (1680 x 850) - Lots of desktop real estate - this was a requirement
Turion X2 TL-60 - Dual Core, Hardware Virtualization, On-Die Memory Controller w/512KB cache per core - Runs AMD64 distributions - This was a requirement, and ruled out Lenovo or Macbook Pro (too bad)
2GB DDR2-667 RAM, Dual 80GB Drives - Plenty of RAM for OS Virtualization (Nexenta/Solaris, BSD, Windows, Maybe a trial OSX hack) - Software RAID, now allows me to use my laptop for mission critical work, without the risk of disk failure - This quickly became a requirement once I learned the HP laptops supported it. When drive prices come down, I will drop in more capacity. For now my main capacity requirement is for media, most of which will be NFS mounted from my new Thecus N2100 replacing my NSLU2 (due to memory limitations).
Other Bells and Whistles including DVD burner, webcam, nice finish, good speakers, card readers and various I/O ports

Everything installed from Debian packages, which was nice. Kernel option pci=usepirqmask can lead to instability before X is loaded; noapic is totally stable, but breaks USB2. A quick overview of what I have completed/learned in the evenings of the Christmas break so far:

Disk Layout - I Installed Debian to the second hard disk (sdb), leaving the pre-installed, unconfigured Windows partition (with free Vista upgrade later) alone for now. Since I opted out of the $20 restore disk I will backup these partitions, using ntfsclone, in their pristine state before launching the default setup process, and then modify the partition tables and enable Software RAID. The partition layout on the first disk was as follows

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 3135 25181856 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 8355 9598 9992430 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda3 9599 9729 1052257+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

PCI Hardware - Below is an lspci from my current 2.6.18-3-amd64 kernel

00:00.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Host Bridge (rev a2) 00:00.1 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 0 (rev a2) 00:00.2 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 1 (rev a2) 00:00.3 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 5 (rev a2) 00:00.4 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 4 (rev a2) 00:00.5 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Host Bridge (rev a2) 00:00.6 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 3 (rev a2) 00:00.7 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 2 (rev a2) 00:02.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge (rev a1) 00:03.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge (rev a1) 00:04.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge (rev a1) 00:09.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Host Bridge (rev a2) 00:0a.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP51 LPC Bridge (rev a3) 00:0a.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation MCP51 SMBus (rev a3) 00:0a.3 Co-processor: nVidia Corporation MCP51 PMU (rev a3) 00:0b.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP51 USB Controller (rev a3) 00:0b.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP51 USB Controller (rev a3) 00:0d.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP51 IDE (rev f1) 00:0e.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Serial ATA Controller (rev f1) 00:0f.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Serial ATA Controller (rev f1) 00:10.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP51 PCI Bridge (rev a2) 00:10.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio (rev a2) 00:14.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Ethernet Controller (rev a3) 00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration 00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map 00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller 00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control 03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4310 UART (rev 01) 05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G70 [GeForce Go 7600] (rev a1) 07:05.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd Unknown device 0832 07:05.1 Generic system peripheral [0805]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 19) 07:05.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd Unknown device 0843 (rev 01) 07:05.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 0a) 07:05.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev 05)

dv9000z Debian Installation Notes - Etch RC1 Installer, upgraded to Sid

Graphical Installer did not have working mouse support (Synaptic or External USB), used expert.
Do not use the ALT-Fn consoles during the install; My installation froze when I tried to observe the other consoles during download of packages.
Once installed, immediately add pci=usepirqmask to the kernel boot options, or the system freezes sporatically (Better than noapic that breaks USB2).

Wireless BCM4310 - (as seen in lspci above) is enabled easily with ndiswrapper

I used the 64bit Windows driver (sp33008.exe) suggested by WiskeyTangoFoxtrot
Note this link is the same as the HP link, so I am not convinced about the differences WiskeyTangoFoxtrot suggests (64bit vs 32bit).

nVidia GeForce Go 7600 - (as seen in lspci above) is enabled easily with the nVidia 9631 drivers

These were in experimental pending the Etch release, so I went straight to the 9631 version - I assume it was required given the newness of the Go 7600

Installation Transcript - Right from my .bash_history ; non-related stuff removed

// Add pci=noapic, unlesss stable USB2 is required.. then gamble with pci=usepirqmask (which I have found stable after GUI loads with some kernels)
vi /boot/grub/menu.lst
reboot // Add debian-multimedia.org, sid and experimental repositories
vi /etc/apt/sources.list
// Set default to unstable (so all experimental does not come down)
vi /etc/apt/apt.conf
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade
// Add the gpg keys for debian-multimedia to avoid unwanted warnings
gpg –keyserver hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net –recv-keys 1F41B907
gpg –armor –export 1F41B907 | apt-key add -
// Grab the current nvidia stuff
apt-get install nvidia-glx nvidia-xconfig nvidia-settings
// Grab the 9361 nVidia drivers
apt-get install nvidia-kernel-source/experimental fakeroot patchutils kernel-package devscripts build-essential
apt-get install module-assistant
// Auto-build and install nVidia packages against the current kernel
m-a a-i nvidia
apt-get install nvidia-glx/experimental
// Reconfigure Xorg, selecting ‘nvidia’ driver and resolution, otherwise defaults
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
// Test out new module
modprobe nvidia
// Add ‘nvidia’ to the list
vi /etc/modules
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install apt-listchanges
apt-get install apt-listbugs
apt-get install vim screen
// Check how hot my new laptop is getting
cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature
// See what ndis* related packages exist and grap ‘em
apt-cache pkgnames | grep ndis
apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 ndiswrapper-source ndiswrapper-utils ndiswrapper-common
// Auto-build and install the ndiswrapper packages
m-a a-i ndiswrapper
apt-get install cabextract
// Downloaded sp33008.exe using my web browser in the background
cd downloads/
ls
cabextract sp33008.exe
ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
ndiswrapper -l
lsmod | grep bcm
ndiswrapper -m
// Some weird output from having both the 1.1 and 1.9 ndis-utils but all fine
cat /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper
modprobe ndiswrapper
// Take down my wired connection to test wireless
ifconfig eth1 down
// Set my essid and basic WEP key (these are unique to me)
iwconfig wlan0 essid Westshore
iwconfig wlan0 key 4165551212
dhclient wlan0
// IT WORKED - awesome; I have had this fail on MANY BCM4306 cards (HP nx6325, WPM54G PCI)
ifconfig
routre
route
iwconfig wlan0
// Add ‘ndiswrapper’ to have it load automatically
vi /etc/modules
// Modify my interfaces to bring up wlan0 automatically
vi /etc/network/interfaces

The Disabling IRQ #7 problem that was breaking the USB 2.0 (known issue) was resolved by switching to pci=usepirqmask. Next I neet to test out the webcam and cardreader, verify other remaining I/O ports that appear to be working (firewire, Bluetooth, Sound jacks, external video, ExpressCard) and fire up the Xen kernels.
Other dv9000 links

Fedora Core 6 on Intel Version - Proof the graphics should work fine
Ubuntu 6.06 on V3000 (Similar Hardware) - Found the 64bit ndis driver
Gentoo on dv6000z - Found the pci=usepirqmask option
Linux on Laptops discussion - Ongoing discussion on the HP nForce laptop hardware
HP Supports Debian! (Okay, this is just FYI)

I have now patched nvidia drivers for use with Xen sucessfully; Unfortunately I can’t get Xen up with ‘noapic’ and with pci=usepirqmask, nvidia module loading causes reboot. Time to look at 2.6.19 or other apic options for Xen.