Rethinking Home Computing.. Continued

There's no HAM content in this post..

Following on from my thoughts on changes to my home computing situation, it's been an interesting few days. 

Yesterday I put efforts into getting my Nvidia GeForce 1050Ti working on an ESX host passed through to a VM.

That was a pain: Nvidia doesn't like consumer GPUs running in enterprise hardware - if their drivers see the hypervisor, they won't load. 

There is a cpuid flag to add to the vmx file to get it to hide the hypervisor when passing the GPU through. Booting the VM however resulted in the boot process stalling at SMP, after throwing a few lines about CPUID. Interesting.

All of the researched lead to people complaining about the hypervisor.cpuid.v0 flag needing to be there and not much else. 

I discovered after hours of looking, one person mentioning that they could get it working with a single vCPU. So could I. That at least confirmed that the hypervisor was hidden from the Nvidia drivers - with a single vCPU, I could boot and I could confirm that the drivers were running. 

A few more hours later, I fall across a hint to remove the Intel microcode from Ubuntu. Bam. Problem solved. 

I then had the issue that my media software ran inside Docker, which added an extra layer of garbage to deal with. I pulled that database out and moved it back to where the OS could see it. More work to be done, but as of right now, the media server can transcode using the GPU, as can the application that I use to keep my media library in h265 format.

Progress. The media transcoding system will take a few days to sort through all of the media it needs to handle. There's a lot of it. In the middle are a heap of new media that requires transcodes. 

The new Kogan Atlas E300 Mini PC is here. It's not documented - hitting Esc at the Kogan splash screen gets into the BIOS. 

The footprint is good. Seems OK. I've got it driving a 4K and 1980x1080p monitors so it's pushing the graphics hard. I've got the RAM maxed out already. 

So far though it's workable. I think that this box might wind up becoming the radio PC. I may need to look at a USB audio interface for the G90, then I should be able to run both radios and an SDR off it. The entire machine runs off a 2A wall wart style power supply. Yuck, but OK. At $219 though, it will serve a purpose if it keeps working.

The next one will be a NUC - something that I can get at least 8GB RAM in, and be able to upgrade it. 

My old desktop has an old Nvidia workstation GPU of some description in it, and it's running Windows 10. It's been off since I finished installing it. I'm tempted to move it to the garage and just have a wall plate with a momentary switch wired direct to the motherboard to turn it on and USB port to connect a card reader. It would be nice to get the space back under the desk. I will mainly use it via RDP, so no need for the monitor to pass through (though not a big deal).  Having wake on LAN would be nice, as I could avoid the need for a physical switch, but it would seem that neither of the NICs installed in that machine seem to behave with WoL properly. It's not going to be hard to find bits to make this work. Cheaper than messing with new NICs that may nor may not behave the way I want.