Tag Archives: iommu

USBs and IOMMUs and moving disk mounts … oh my!

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In my last post I commented about my USB situation, which I hoped would be quickly resolved with a USB expansion card. I picked up this model from Inateck; a 5-port USB A device which would allow me to connect my USB switcher for keyboard & webcam, a headset for gaming, as well as gamepads and wheels.

It arrived with customary Amazon quickness, and I added it to the machine. Slightly annoyingly it (and others) required a power connection from the PSU, as the PCIe slots can’t supply the 5V required. I was out of SATA connectors so this meant running a Molex cable through the case (urgh).

I brought the machine back online and found the new USB device sitting happily in its own IOMMU group, so I bound it to VFIO, rebooted the server, then passed it through to the Windows machine and started it up.

That’s where my troubles began.

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Blackjack Updates

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So it’s been six days since my last post, and after a busy and at times frustrating week (work-wise, nothing to do with Blackjack) I have some more updates.

First, good news.
The Plex migration worked flawlessly as I mentioned in the last post. We’ve been running it for 6 days now and have watched a bunch of stuff on it without any issue whatsoever. This is what should have happened but I’m still pleased.

As you can see, I’m also penning this on my Windows 10 VM, using dual screens. The performance is excellent – it’s faster at booting than the bare metal install on my old machine!

I’ve now shut down my old machine, physically replacing it with Blackjack and swapping the rest of the memory. We’re now running on 64GB total, with 24GB reserved for the Windows 10 machine. It was pretty happy with 8 and I’m sure would be happy with 16, but if I have a surplus why not use it?
So far the containers I have running aren’t taxing the system much at all, but I have further plans which may drive that usage higher.

There have been a few things that haven’t quite worked as well as I’d hoped though.

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