Compatible Hardware.

[Sir Hugo Drax]

Hello everyone,


Like most of you, I came upon Qubes OS and fell in love. I have it
running on an Asrock Z77 Extreme 11 with 32GBram and an i7-4790K. Apart
from a few unexplained hangups from time to time, it has been smooth
sailing. I'm in the process of building a brute of a machine (For heavy
number crunching and video editing etc). My objective is to some day
retire the machine I'm currently building into my daily driver with
Qubes OS but that is some time in the future.

My current confusion is over 3 parts on my build list. I wish to know if
these are compatible with Qubes 4.

- X2 Intel Xeon Silver 4114 2,20GHz

- Supermicro X11DPi-NT

- Sapphire Radeon RX 580 Pulse

I suspect The board and processors are probably OK but have no clue if
the above graphic card would work. Any information and or suggestions
for alternatives if these are unsupported is appreciated and welcome.


Thanks in advance for your time and heartfelt appreciation to the Qubes
team who toil over this OS.


Cheers


Drax

[Tai...@gmx.com]

That hardware is quite new so it probably won't play nice with qubes,
and like any new x86-64 hardware it has a black box supervisor processor
(in this case Intel ME)
Intel CPU's are also now 30% slower due to the meltdown/spectre bug.

I would instead suggest a system that has owner controlled libre
firmware available such as the KGPE-D16 or KCMA-D8 boards for improved
security - they have a qubes HCL entry and as there is no hardware code
signing enforcement they have the ability for the firmware to be fixed
in case anything incompatibilities arise (which will never happen with
most OEM's leaving your IOMMU broken or what not)
Coreboot for these boards has open source hardware init.

The KGPE-D16 supports dual cpus, up to 32 cores and 192GB RAM, the
KCMA-D8 supports dual cpus, 16 cores and 128GB RAM - both support a port
of OpenBMC for secure libre remote management and IOMMU-GFX so you can
play games in a VM as well. Coupled with a supported AMD graphics card
(nvidia isn't friendly with linux) and I guarantee you will be more
satisfied and more secure for a lot less money than that xeon build.

[Yethal]

GPU won't be compatible out of the box with 3.2 due to the fact that 3.2 ships with 4.4 kernel (Plaris GPUs require kernel 4.7 or newer). Should work fine after updating the kernel though.

[Grzegorz Chodzicki]

On 01/06/2018 10:41 PM, Sir Hugo Drax wrote:

> Hi Yethal,
>
> Thanks for the prompt reply and good tip. Do you know of any GPU of
> equivalent power that would work out of the box? I'm not too particular
> about GPUs, I just need something that would drive dual Asus VN279QLB
> monitors without too much trouble.
>
> Cheers
> Drax
>
Don't bother. The supermicro motherboard comes with an onboard gpu. It's
very basic but should be enough to install the os and update the kernel.
Afterwards just use the Radeon.

[Tai...@gmx.com]

On 01/06/2018 05:02 PM, Sir Hugo Drax wrote:

> Hi Taiidan,
>
> That's a pretty sweet setup you have from a privacy standpoint. I wish I
> could put one together for myself right now. But alas things are
> unfortunately not in a way I can do that. The parts I listed are for a
> project that pays the bills and that has to take priority for now.
Always man, that project may not be cool with the lower opteron per core
speed.
If you don't mind I am curious what you are doing! (feel free to reply
off list)
> Using the system for Qubes is an after thought for when the parts would be
> retired from active use. However I do have a question concerning the
> the motherboard you recommended.
In case you are curious about the performance differential.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+Silver+4114+%40+2.20GHz&id=3095
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Opteron+6386+SE&id=2294
>
> Does the KGPE-D16 or KCMA-D8 support an Nvme PCI-E  SSD like an Intel
> 750 Series PCIe 400GB?
Yeah there are a few on the coreboot mailinglist who use those and they
are satisfied, the D16 has more PCI-e bandwidth to go around so I would
get that if you want more high bandwidth PCI-e cards.
The OEM board firmware doesn't support booting but some coreboot
payloads do.
> I ask this since both boards have Gen2 PCI-E
> slots and I don't know if those slots shall be a bottleneck if I desired
> building a separate system some day around one of these boards.
The slots are all directly connected to the northbridge so none are
over-subscribed

The main SSD wow-factor areas are write-speed and I/O both of which
won't be impacted by 2.0 so I highly doubt you would notice in anything
but a fringe use case - having a drive that is x8 or x16 also helps as
you would have more lanes and thus more bandwidth of v2.0.
> Given
> the philosophy behind Qubes, I'm really tempted to seriously look into
> such a build and how it woul fit together. What graphic card would you
> recommend for the above boards?
As always I recommend AMD graphics as nvidia isn't friendly to linux or
virtualization, other then that I don't keep up with the marketing - of
course you will want something new with plenty of VRAM if you want to
play new video games, you can also get two graphics cards if you want to
have dual gaming VM's as the board comes with dual USB controllers out
of the box if you use a breakout cable.

[Samupaha]

On Sunday, January 7, 2018 at 12:58:23 AM UTC+2, Tai...@gmx.com wrote:
> On 01/06/2018 05:02 PM, Sir Hugo Drax wrote:

> > Does the KGPE-D16 or KCMA-D8 support an Nvme PCI-E  SSD like an Intel
> > 750 Series PCIe 400GB?
> Yeah there are a few on the coreboot mailinglist who use those and they
> are satisfied, the D16 has more PCI-e bandwidth to go around so I would
> get that if you want more high bandwidth PCI-e cards.
> The OEM board firmware doesn't support booting but some coreboot
> payloads do.

How difficult it is to get Qubes to boot from NVMe drive in KGPE-D16? I'm thinking about buying it and I'd like to have NVMe drive for the OS. But I have very limited experience with coreboot/BIOS stuff, so hopefully I don't need to spend several days fighting to get it work.

[Tai...@gmx.com]

On 01/07/2018 12:49 PM, Samupaha wrote:

> How difficult it is to get Qubes to boot from NVMe drive in KGPE-D16? I'm thinking about buying it and I'd like to have NVMe drive for the OS. But I have very limited experience with coreboot/BIOS stuff, so hopefully I don't need to spend several days fighting to get it work.
>

Very easy - same as a regular drive as both grub and SeaBIOS support
nvme devices. I do not know anything about the vendor bios and NVME but
it will definitely work via coreboot.

Get the board while you still can as soon they will stop making them :[