HCL - DELL PRECISION T7400

[ludwig jaffe]

Hi, I am running Qubes 3.2 on my Dell-Monster.

2 flaws:

1st: if I enable VT-d the machine crashes while or after booting the xen-kernel

(I experienced it with the older kernel the one prior 4.4.14-11!) I also
run old BIOS A2 instead of A11 as I fear upgrade, as
it could brick the machine if this gets wrong.


2nd: the fans are sometimes *really* noisy,
like a starting concorde, but the processer is quite cool.


So one needs to run


ik2fan speed 1 1 to get it quite silent. One small fan still


is to loud. I need to find it. I guess it is the nvidia graphics
 fan.



Important: It should be possible to install additional software


to dom0 with more comfort!


Doing yumdownload (some package) and then copy it using the


command line tools as they are nice but ugly to use w/o cut and


paste to dom0 :-(



Maybe, you should include these packages to the dom0 repository


as there are also noisy dell laptops around...



What I did to get the fans more silent is to make sure to have lm_sensors (was provided in dom0 repository, thanks, installed by default?)



Then I did the more unpleasent stuff:


yumdownlod of the packages in personal vm, of course...



on dom0:



qvm-run --pass-io personal 'cat /home/user/dell/i8kutils-1.33.-8.fc22.x86_64.rpm' > /home/XXXX/i8kutils-1.33.-8.fc22.x86_64.rpm
qvm-run --pass-io personal 'cat /home/user/dell/tk-8.6.4-2.fc23.x86_64' > /home/XXXX/tk-8.6.4-2.fc23.x86_64
qvm-run --pass-io personal 'cat /home/user/dell/tk-8.6.4-2.fc23.x86_64.rpm' > /home/XXXX/tk-8.6.4-2.fc23.x86_64.rpm
qvm-run --pass-io personal 'cat /home/user/dell/tcl-8.6.4-1.fc23.x86_64.rpm' > /home/XXXX/tcl-8.6.4-1.fc23.x86_64.rpm
qvm-run --pass-io personal 'cat /home/user/dell/i8kutils-1.33.-8.fc22.x86_64.rpm' > /home/XXXX/i8kutils-1.33.-8.fc22.x86_64.rpm
qvm-run --pass-io personal 'cat /home/user/dell/i8kutils-1.33-8.fc22.x86_64.rpm' > /home/XXXX/i8kutils-1.33-8.fc22.x86_64.rpm
qvm-run --pass-io personal 'cat /home/user/dell/gkrellm-2.3.7-2.fc23.x86_64.rpm' > /home/XXXX/gkrellm-2.3.7-2.fc23.x86_64.rpm
qvm-run --pass-io personal 'cat /home/user/dell/libntlm-1.4-4.fc23.x86_64.rpm' > /home/XXXX/libntlm-1.4-4.fc23.x86_64.rpm

sudo dnf install tk-8.6.4-2.fc23.x86_64.rpm
sudo dnf install tcl-8.6.4-1.fc23.x86_64.rpm
sudo dnf install libntlm-1.4-4.fc23.x86_64.rpm
sudo dnf install gkrellm-2.3.7-2.fc23.x86_64.rpm
sudo dnf install i8kutils-1.33-8.fc22.x86_64.rpm



all w/o cut and paste :-(



But now there is silence:



ik8fan
1 1



As it was loud it said:


ik8fan
3 3



to get it silent type


ik8fan 1 1



ik8fan 2 2 is a acceptable loud.




check the temperature with sensors. And also open the case


to feel the two cooler blocks, to check if the computer lies to you.




So thats all, for now, thanks for qubes, it is cool on such


an old machine as the machine is cheap and ddr2 ecc memory
is quite cheap.
This box can theoretically pimped upto 128GB. 


2 CPUs with 4 cores each and 40GB are enough for the moment.






Have fun



Ludwig






[ludwig jaffe]

One mistake:

the command is i8kfan speed 1 1

Also I did not check if VT-d enabled works now with the current version (including current updates) of qubes 3.2, as I was lazy.

I will check later and read the bios first with a flash programmer just to be sure not to destroy anything. But the machine boots,

why updating the bios. I will do it later...

Have fun.

[ludwig jaffe]

updated hcl file.

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 11:18:47AM -0400, ludwig jaffe wrote:
> Hi, I am running Qubes 3.2 on my Dell-Monster.
> 2 flaws:
> 1st: if I enable VT-d the machine crashes while or after booting the
> xen-kernel
> (I experienced it with the older kernel the one prior 4.4.14-11!) I also
> run old BIOS A2 instead of A11 as I fear upgrade, as
> it could brick the machine if this gets wrong.

There is a chance that BIOS upgrade will improve the situation here. I'd
recommend checking BIOS changelog / release notes.

> 2nd: the fans are sometimes *really* noisy,
> like a starting concorde, but the processer is quite cool.
> So one needs to run
> ik2fan speed 1 1 to get it quite silent. One small fan still
> is to loud. I need to find it. I guess it is the nvidia graphics
> fan.
>
> Important: It should be possible to install additional software
> to dom0 with more comfort!
> Doing yumdownload (some package) and then copy it using the
> command line tools as they are nice but ugly to use w/o cut and
> paste to dom0 :-(
>
> Maybe, you should include these packages to the dom0 repository
> as there are also noisy dell laptops around...
>
> What I did to get the fans more silent is to make sure to have lm_sensors
> (was provided in dom0 repository, thanks, installed by default?)
>
> Then I did the more unpleasent stuff:

(...)

You can do this much more convenient way:

sudo qubes-dom0-update i8kutils

Also, it will be much more secure, as manually downloading rpm packages
(via yumdownloader) do not enforce signature being checked.

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
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[Tai...@gmx.com]

Updating the bios might fix your VT-d issue however a lot of the older
dell computers have bad implementations/DMAR tables - you are also stuck
with an earlier processor with IOMMU V1 which lacks interrupt remapping
(a security feature).

Worse comes to worse you can always use flashrom and write the bios
externally.