rants, tirades, ruminations

I’m still running a virtualized Windows environment. I just upgraded to Windows 10 Pro using the 2012R2 virtio drivers since native drivers don’t seem to exist yet. All of that is working well.

I ended up skipping the nonsense with irqbalance and simply let it run on every processor. It doesn’t seem to make a huge amount of difference either way. I’m still running with the performance CPU frequency governor as I end up with too much jitter in video and audio playback otherwise. I wonder if running on an Intel processor would be better in this particular area?

I stopped passing through my USB ports directly as I was getting a lot of AMD-Vi error messages from the kernel. Everything was still working, but it was aggravating to have my dmesg full of garbage. So now my /etc/modprobe.d/local.conf looks like:

install vfio_pci /sbin/modprobe --first-time --ignore-install vfio_pci ; \
        /bin/echo 0000:02:00.0 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:02:00.0/driver/unbind ; \
        /bin/echo 10de 1189 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/new_id ; \
        /bin/echo 0000:02:00.1 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:02:00.1/driver/unbind ; \
        /bin/echo 10de 0e0a > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/new_id
options kvm-amd npt=0

And I’ve updated my qemu-system command accordingly:

taskset -ac 4-7 qemu-system-x86_64 \
        -qmp unix:/run/qmp-sock,server,nowait \
        -display none \
        -enable-kvm \
        -M q35,accel=kvm \
        -m 8192 \
        -cpu host,kvm=off \
        -smp 4,sockets=1,cores=4,threads=1 \
        -mem-path /dev/hugepages \
        -rtc base=localtime,driftfix=slew \
        -device ioh3420,bus=pcie.0,addr=1c.0,multifunction=on,port=1,chassis=1,id=root \
        -device vfio-pci,host=02:00.0,bus=root,addr=00.0,multifunction=on,x-vga=on -vga none \
        -device vfio-pci,host=02:00.1,bus=root,addr=00.1 \
        -usb -usbdevice host:10.4 -usbdevice host:10.5 \
        -device virtio-scsi-pci,id=scsi \
        -drive if=none,file=/dev/win/cdrive,format=raw,cache=none,id=win-c -device scsi-hd,drive=win-c \
        -drive if=none,format=raw,file=/dev/sr0,id=blu-ray -device scsi-block,drive=blu-ray \
        -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0 -netdev bridge,id=net0,helper=/usr/lib/qemu/qemu-bridge-helper &

I’m using the host:bus.addr format for usbdevice as otherwise I’d be passing through a whole lot of USB ports that would match the vendor_id:product_id format. I also get back my USB3 ports under Linux, should I ever really need them (and can always pass them through to Windows should I need to using this same functionality instead of dealing with the vfio-pci stuff).

I also upgraded my host GPU to a passively cooled GeForce 730 as the 8400 was causing weirdness with my receiver trying to detect audio constantly over the DVI to HDMI converter. This kept interrupting the S/PDIF audio I had coming in from the motherboard. Now everything comes over a proper HDMI connection. However, I was disappointed to discover that apparently there hasn’t been a lot of progress made on passing through lossless, high quality audio formats like TrueHD or DTS-HD MA under Linux. mplayer, mpv, and vlc all seemed to be a bust in this regard and Kodi (formerly XBMC) just crashed my machine due to an unrelated nouveau bug, so I didn’t get to test it any further. I can get normal DTS/AC-3 stuff working over HDMI just fine, but not the fancy stuff. I guess I’ll stick to Windows for playing that stuff back even though it’s all stored on my Linux machine. It would have been nice to get that working directly from Linux.