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traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body

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Man, this is a 180° turn for me. When I started out with Linux the GPUs where usually troublemakers and I kinda got used to throw moar power at it to solve the problem. Spent nights fiddling with Elsa Winner or 3Dfx Vodoo or some ATI cards (that eventual became AMD). When laptops of mine could no longer be used because AMD simply dropped support for perfectly fine hardware I was really never again buying from it again.

The background for finally ripping out the heart of my Linux PC is basically this issue: https://beko.famkos.net/2020/01/17/computer-fallen

NVRM: GPU 0000:01:00.0: GPU has fallen off the bus.

This is followed by a frozen X server rendering all HID interfaces dead until reboot. It happened once or twice a week. NVIDIA support has no idea and while the card is still fine and up for any task I finally decided to get a more recent GPU hoping that the problem will be gone (and not be an issue from the mainboard).

So here I am in 2020 ripping out the heart of my Linux PC.

The decision to try AMD again after a decade was basically made because I read so much positive news on their open source drivers and general good support by Mesa nowadays. Since nothing about the old fglrx days is valid any more this is sort of a jump into cold water for me 🙂

I decided for the slightly older RX 5600 XT 14Gbps 6GB (THICC III Pro) edition by XFX that seems to be good for 1080p gaming and this is close to my main display resolution of 1920×1200. While I never heard of XFX before I was hooked by NO RGB and that tiny vBios switch it has offering a backup bios. That’s a feature I like in my mainboards as well.

Speaking of I heard a lot of confusion on said vBioses on this series so I digged deeper on this topic. Thankfully a lot of the legwork was already done for me by André Almeida who describes the process for Linux PC on https://andrealmeid.com/post/2020-05-01-vbios2/ after a lot of research in part 1.

With the help of the mentioned tool amdvbflash I was able to drag the following vBios information out of the GPU:

AMDVBFLASH version 4.71, Copyright (c) 2020 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

    Product Name is :    NAVI10 A1/A2 D1990301 XLE 6GB 300e/875m 
    Device ID is    :    731F
    Bios Version    :    017.001.000.068.000000
    Bios P/N is     :    113-170WCNAVIXLE6
    Bios SSID       :    5710
    Bios SVID       :    1682
    Bios Date is    :    03/27/20 21:25

The extracted rom of the active vBios (switch was set on position closer to power connector) has the sha1sum 9ce7ecc9625d7ff39b3b08c45916b6c2e3bf4a8c and is according to the flashing tool valid and signed. I understood it’s a bad idea to flash with an unsigned rom because the GPU will probably refuse to boot. I’d upload it to techpowerup that seems to collect such roms and allows hassle free downloading but their extract and upload tool seems to be for Windows PC only.

XFX has vBios roms for the 12Gbps variant on it’s website but currently none for this one so it seems it is up to date already.

Installing it was a breeze. I upgraded to Fedora Workstation 32 before changing the GPU to make sure I get more recent drivers and that was it. System booted up just fine and the card worked out of the box. Unlike NVIDIA I didn’t need to download a specific driver first or add some further repository. There’s this nice tool CoreCtrl that shows me a power consumption of only 14W while the card is in idle with zero spinning fans. That’s right – no noise! When not in use this card consumes next to no resources which begs the question how I’m going to heat my man cave from now on 😀

CoreCtrl in action

This surprised me as well. All the cool bits are laid out for me to play with at /sys/class/drm/card1/device/. I mean I’m not much into over-clocking but it’s all there. This brings me to benchmarking the new GPU. I’m not some YTer so you’ll only get the Unigine Superposition benchmark with basically irrelevant OpenGL (I know of no nifty Vulkan benchmark like this yet) for Linux PC gaming.

The tool picked up the wrong model (it really is a FX 5600 XT)

That’s rad! My old Titan X has it’s stronger side in other features but managed only a total result of 3055 without over-clocking on this benchmark.

I’ve not much gaming experience with it yet. I just made sure that Valheim (beta) and X4 Foundations works fine with it. There seems to be some sound issue with Discord + Fullscreen that I found so far but I solved this by switching to windowed mode on the games seeing no difference in FPS.

The one notable issue I have compared with NVIDIA is that I have to set the environment variable DRI_PRIME=1 or games will pick up the integrated GPU of the i5-8600K. This is probably because I’ve a display connected to it as well so it’s active. Going to play with this a little until I get the idea. Will need some adapters first tho 😅

Update: Just as guessed. Once I had all my adapters in place the integrated GPU was not needed any more and does no longer show up. No need to use DRI_PRIME=1 for each 3D application any more.

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Sunday and way too hot. On top my children kept bugging me: “Boring, I want to do something!”. So what’s better than hiding in the cool basement and build something?

We had this construction kit for an insect hotel laying around for quite some time now and this was the perfect day to assemble it.

The kit was short on pipe objects so in the end we drilled some ourselves to fill the hotel up properly. Such things are usually packed by weight so this can happen.

I’m surprised how well that went. Kids didn’t get into a fight and even sticked around until the end. They even painted it together. That’s quite something for our little circus here.

Now we have to find a good spot in the garden for it.

CC-BY-NC-SA

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It was way to warm today so I hid in the basement for most of the day getting some stuff done. Mostly cleaning up. The place was a mess.

While doing so I cleaned all my swords that were cluttered all over the place 🤓 Other gear was also in dire need of training. My fencing vest was probably occupied by a cat for a long time and used as a nest. Tried it on after months and all the training pays off. It fits again – breathing included 🤺

Fitting in my fencing vest again – feels good

While clearing my workbench I found a cable drum waiting for a new plug. Later I found replacement plugs so I got that finally fixed too 😀

Good as new plug for the cable drum

I also found this little treasure of 19 FFP2 masks filled in 2009. Lucky me, eh? Feeling very rich now 😀

Box of old but good FFP2 masks

Kids were also around most of the time and had a lot of fun with various training tools. Don’t get it wrong, we’re not particular athletic here. Stuff just piles up.

Busy day.

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“Releases for PC”. Oh we Linux gamers know this phrase well. So it seems that is taking another approach now instead of the usual “PC is not Windows”. Liam changed the wording on the news slightly:

Beyond a Steel Sky to release for Linux PC during July

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/06/beyond-a-steel-sky-to-release-for-linux-pc-during-july

I like that approach and I shall also use “Linux PC” in the future. And not just for my .

 

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While checking some very old backups of mine I stumbled over some really old HTML files. Turns out they are old websites of mine – including my very own that apparently went live on the 23rd June in 2000 on the free hoster FortuneCity.

Screenshot of the FortuneCity hosted first website of mine – sadly I didn’t bother to backup the images. Disk space was sacred.

For a quick recap: In 2000 WordPress didn’t exist yet, webspace and bandwidth were costly and a database was an extra you had to pay for. People wrote their websites in very unique styles and ways and many started out doing so at all. SelfHTML was my browser “home” for months.

Back then I went with the nick DukeBernd, or Duke for short. It still shows in various domains and mail addresses of mine but was soon replaced by beko, that was not only shorter but also way less popular and also holds parts of my real name (and that was actually never a secret by the way).

While learning more and more on HTML I also started with Warhammer 40k tabletop and LARP. As a student I obviously had all the time of the world. The website changed a lot in appearance during the early days and yes I had it all, animated gifs, blinking text, under construction signs and… browser requirements. Here some more screenshots for [y]our amusement from 2000 to 2002:

Hosting changed also all the time. There was a brief episode with Crosswinds but the roundtrip was awful and the website was slow to a point that images stopped loading so I was quite happy when my school started to offer some tiny amount of webspace that I used to offload most of my images – mostly drawings – as some sort of handicraft content distribution system. I had also various domains pointing to intro and landing pages. It was a huge mess and most are dead by now and I only kept the current .net domain.

This was also about the time when I came in contact with Linux, as you can guess from the next screenshot showing a design I was quite happy with and went with for years to come.

Website redesign in bash / terminal look (blinking cursor gif included)

While most of this is offline nowadays some of the LARP articles survived but I had no desire to migrate ~400 hand written HTML files (no frames) about Warhammer into a CMS some years later. My drawings are also best forgotten 😉

In 2004 I migrated to 1&1 hosting with a database. That was a goal for years and I could finally afford to pay for this. Soon I discovered this brand new content management system called WordPress and started learning PHP.

This changed everything since the idea of dynamically assembled website code was totally new and alien to me. I dived into what is nowadays known Full Stack Development and as usual my own website and various projects became the playground.

A lot has happened since the early beginnings. I finished formal education, ditched Windows, became that Linux Jack, started working on T3 vans, emigrated to sweden [and back 🙁 ], visited places with my van, worked as driver, distributor and postman until I eventually went back into tech settled down, married and forked/got two children. Who would have guessed.

  • Der Bus läuft

I never stopped programming, gaming, tinkering, trying and gathering know-how.

And it’s all here – mostly. There are some holes thanks to social networks and forums that raised and vanished again taking heaps of bits written with them.

I got takeouts of most of such silos before they vanished but sorting this and migrating it back into my own blog is quite a burden. Still I do so on occasion and on days like this I’m happy for the extra work. It’s the satisfaction of looking back on my own life, having it all in one place. Like a diary. It’s just not as private as a diary but it brings back the memories just the same.

This blog survived twenty years unlike e.g. Google+ and there is still the occasional visitor sent here by an old forum article or by search engine looking for some info or image. And I happily serve. Fixing dead links or wrong wording and re-uploading articles and images in better resolutions as I find them.

Blogging ain’t dead.

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I was nominated by Sebastian Reinbold to annoy everyone with LARP images of myself for ten days. I’ll pass on the nominating part myself – your timeline is yours and I usually do not participate in such ‘games’ anyway – but since it has been a while and I’m sort of having nostalgic flashbacks going by now, here goes nothing:

1 / 10

This image was taken during breakfast on the Irrlichter SWL in 2010. My participation was a last minute surprise and all of my gear was borrowed for the roles I got to play.

It also was an indoor con set in the SW verse and in the wintertime.

I also recall having an ache from all the laughing on that weekend 😀

2 / 10

Next in line is really old. It was taken in 2003 on Nebellegenden 8 – Auf den Spuren des Heiligen Prätorius where I – the smallest NSC in the group – got to play a bear.

This is a fun story because the costume was shrunk after washing and I was the only one who fitted somewhat into it at all.

So I was a tiny bear for our brave ranger to appease 😀

3 / 10

The next one was at Rathad an Damh – Der Weg des Hirschen 1 in 2016 probably taken by Aerfeiniel.

The setting was a celtic horror con in October and featured many undead zombies and litres of artifical blood.

Our fine and highly motivated NSC group kept the players bittenbusy day and night.

In the end I almost collapsed from dehydration and sleep deprivation but I was happy. So much fun and very epic moments. I’m just a bit sad that I missed most of the great feast in the end due to that.

4 / 10

This one is not exactly LARP and falls probably more into the category of Living History.

While my clothes are a wild mix mostly originated in LARP this is from a hike in mediaeval gear.

I don’t recall the year but I remember the walk of 20km in period footwear – and one guy even barefoot.

5 / 10

This is a more recent one from 2017. I have no idea who took this but the con was In der Flanke des Feindes.

The con was a bit unusual for me because I was a cast SCs but not allowed in the NSC camp on this. I don’t even remember the exact reasons but I remember doing what I do best a lot – getting beaten down 😀

I’ve also very fond memories of my tent oven because this was a rainy and cold weekend and we enjoyed plenty of hours in the warm tent playing dices.

6 / 10

This reminds me of a very arid one. It’s the infamous NewNo Order 2003.

Water had to be fetched from far away, so we had people picking up water for the camp all the time.

The camp was located on a dry meadow with a high voltage overland line over our heads.

Dust was everywhere. In the air, our shoes and probably even in the food. In the end there was eventually a thunderstorm and I’ve never seen people getting out of their plate armour in such a short time.

7 / 10

Speaking of armour. This one is from Drachenfest in 2002 and I’m wearing my very first mail. Well, sort of 😀

That was basically my second part of protective gear at all and out of money this was all I could muster back then. The helmet was my first and most important part.

There’s a story on that nasal helmet by the way. On my very first con I took a bad slash to my face. The nasal was bent and I had to form it back into shape. Almost nobody had a helmet in 2002 and I was really happy for mine.

People will laugh at this nowadays but twenty years ago I was proud on this piece 😉 Wonder where it ended up.

8 / 10

Here I played probably for the last time my Witcher back in 2014 at Der ruhelose Wald 2.

There’s a certain satiation for Witchers in LARP by now and frankly others play way better. Well, mayhap not the sword-ing but the costumes. The standards are high nowadays.

Sorry for the bad quality of the image. Somehow I never got my hands on a decent picture for this role – which is kinda sad.

9 / 10

Here is another one where I’m very sad that I got no decent picture of. It’s from 2004 – Drachenfest.

I was on guard duty – something I seem to do a lot as well (pestering people for Permit A 38 is so much fun) – wearing a borrowed cuirass. It was a perfect fit and I was sorry when I had to hand it back to it’s proper owner.

Years later I’m not much interested in this type or armour any more and while people look great in it it’s just too much of a burden for me anyway. Running away has proven to work as well 😉

10 / 10

That’s it. Thanks for staying with me through my flashback on LARP. A hobby I was infected with in 1996 due to the magazine PC Spiel Fantasy Special.

Many other of my interests nowadays are a direct result of this and while I seldom find the time to go for a play nowadays I still do so on [rare] occasions (and of course I let my children play with foam swords 😉 ).

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Things were going smooth for a while. The pirates didn’t stop harassing my ships so I decided for drastic action. We slacked their station in the system.

The Scale Plate Pact station is no more

That sure put a damper on their actions in the sectors nearby. Surviving ships were hunted down, boarded and taken over. It was glorious. The fleet was unstoppable for a while and with each carefully picked battle it grew.

Gate duty helped to train the fleet further and a lot of sweet loot to improve and modify ships further could be collected.

  • Hunting down Minotaurs
  • Boarding destroyers
  • Light em up
  • Xen pestered the gates
  • And were hunted down
  • Claiming more ships

The highlight was two Xenon K jumping into the sector to be annihilated by my fleet of two destroyers, plenty of small fighters and an auxiliary ship used as bullet sponge.

Battling Xenon K at the gates

This was when I decided to contact the Split while extending my mining business all over the galaxy big time. I started with a bad reputation towards Split – that’s kinda default for most races in the X4 universe – so I had a hard time to make them like me… somewhat. This was mostly achieved by destroying enemy ships near to their stations.

  • Contacting the Split
  • Eventually they accepted my offers
  • Magnetar mining ship

Meanwhile I bought several Magnetar mining ships so keep the needed raw materials on my prospering stations coming. Everything was going nicely and I decided to claim the sector Heretics End.

While I was busy building my stations to do so my new not-exactly-enemies decided to go to battle in freakin Argon Prime. Four Rattle Snake destroyers went basically unchallenged into the Argon heart and took out the Wharf. I didn’t want to interference since I just made not-exactly-enemy with the Split. From here it went downhill fast. Almost all of Argon Prime was wiped out – and I had bought most of my ships there. This! Hurt! Business!

I had not much time to mourn though. While I was busy with my new stations in Heretics End I was ended by a very surprising Xenon attack myself. First two more K ships showed up that I hardly managed to destroy – especially since most of my fleet was busy rescuing some Teladi trading station from another K.

  • Frell, I was not prepared for this
  • Boom, second K goes down in a blaze

While I was busy counting my losses _it_ showed up. The worst nightmare X4 has to offer: The Xenon Branch 9 Destroyer I entered the sector and all I had to offer were two half built stations, some Interceptors and my badly damaged Argon Behemoth destroyer.

Xenon Branch 9 Destroyer I

I tried to keep my distance while waiting for my fleet to arrive. This worked for a while but it eventually was going to destroy my station so I tried to get into it’s blind spot. That was my last stand. Out of mines and turrets, low on interceptors and badly damaged my destroyer went down with me on the bridge.

I accept this glorious defeat – for now 😀

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I wonder for a suited format for a series of log entries for my X4 adventures. Mayhap I should simply edit and append as the story [of my sandbox] unfolds.

Spent most of the day hunting pirates that seem to develop a taste for my ships. The salvaged Cerberus Vanguard is a huge help with this and whenever a pirate surrenders my own support fleet of Minotaur grows. Did I mention that I just love the design of this ship? It’s such a great all-round asset that can even haul some cargo on occasion or act as small carrier.

I also stumbled over another really tiny vault. Took some time to unlock all it’s secrets but I’m starting to get the hang of it.

Raiding a tiny vault

Talking about raiding I had some notable encounters as well. A Raider tried to steal from the current head quarter. That was a mighty stupid idea and the Raider was toast before I even got close to it.

Scale Plate Pact Raider going down in a blaze

And another had the nerve to attack my medium freighters during their duty of making profit. When I finally had enough I called in the fleet and together we started a boarding operation. That was a long and ugly fight mostly because due to a bunch of Xen fighters trashing our party. Lost one small heavy fighter and 45 marines but in the end the ship was ours. Good thing the Cerberus brought a repair drone along to fix the busted engines, by the way.

  • Taking out the engines
  • Docking at the prize after a long battle

I also identified a choking point in Napileos’ Fortune VI where a lot of the pirate traffic seems to originate. It’s an empty and unclaimed sector so I started building an Administrative Center here hoping to get this pest under control.

Claiming Napileos’ Fortune VI

I wonder if it makes sense to start more stations here, because a lot of other huge stations are within 4 sectors of this – the typical maximum distance for auto traders to go – and a lot of traffic is passing through this already.

Oh yeah – and I finally got all the parts to assemble the SINZA device. It’s IMHO not really obvious that it simply activated with Shift+4 because I tried to install it as modification or ship drive first.

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Today I learned about IMA, EVM and TPM on Linux and I feel like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole.

[ 0.784022] ima: No TPM chip found, activating TPM-bypass!

dmesg | grep TPM

Last time I read about this is ~15 years ago and I simply disabled TPM so far since I only remember the concerns from back then about privacy and the impact it may have on free software related to DRM. TrueCrypt also fuelled this believe.

Turns out that TPM is completely passive and can do a lot for me, especially in combination with UEFI and IMA (Integrity Measurement Architecture) or, in fact, with securing personal credentials and even TOTP.

Yes, I read about the ROCA vulnerability, too!