Recent Posts - Page 2 of 7

Nvidia And The “hidden state”

No more need to hide the hypervisor

Ever since I started to run a Microsoft Windows VM with GPU passthrough, Nvidia graphics drivers would only support their professional Quadro line of graphics cards in a virtual machine. Ten years ago I bit the bullet and bought an outrageously expensive Nvidia Quadro 2000 GPU. Truth be told – it’s been and still is a great GPU and I currently use it for my Linux host. Back then the Quadro was passed through to a Windows 7 VM running on Xen. It worked great.

Manjaro Linux Kernel 5.10

I was so busy studying, writing, and processing photos that I didn’t touch my Manjaro Linux host for a long long time. Then one day I decided to upgrade my PC from a 5.4 kernel to the most recent LTS or “Long Term Support” Manjaro Linux kernel 5.10.

Manjaro Linux

A look at Manjaro Linux from a VFIO passthrough user perspective – the benefits and downsides of using Manjaro as a Linux host

Last year in April I switched from Linux Mint via a short detour to Pop_OS to Manjaro Linux as my host OS. The reasons I chose Manjaro Linux were its up-to-date kernel and software and its well-rounded selection of software packages. However, the latest and greatest kernel and software can come at a price of being less stable. In this post I like to weigh in the pros and cons for Manjaro Linux and what you might want to consider before jumping on the wagon.

LVM and the Ease of Migrating to a New Drive

Online data relocation to other drives using LVM and pvmove

These days my disks are filling up fast. My current PC holds 7 drives, including 2 NVMe drives. Actually 8 drives as I installed a new HDD today. All of my disks and partitions – with the notable exception of the FAT16 EFI partition for UEFI boot – are using LVM, the Logical Volume Manager.

With the availability of larger drives at reasonable costs, I decided to move some logical volumes (LV) spanning several drives onto one single drive, thus consolidating disks. This one drive will then be mirrored in a RAID-1 configuration for redundancy.

Note: In a multi-drive LVM Logical Volume each drive represents a potential point of failure. Moving the data from multiple drives onto one drive reduces that risk.

Wildlife in the City

Wildlife in the city of Tel Aviv, Israel – birds in flight and other birds and wildlife photos

Tel Aviv’s Yarkon park is an excellent place to photograph animal wildlife in the city, especially birds. The Yarkon park stretches along the Yarkon river, from the Mediterranean Sea to the neighboring city of Ramat Gan.

Birds shown are egrets, gulls, cormorants, Egyptian geese, moorhens, parakeets and more. Finally there is the hoopoe, Israels national bird.

Click the thumbnail for larger view, then click the “i” (show info) button on the bottom of the image for more information as well as the name of the bird.

The photos were taken with the Nikon D850 or the Nikon D7200 DSLRs using a Nikon 70-200/f4 or a Nikon 200-500/f5.6 lens. Enjoy and come back for updates and more photos.

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Passing Through a Nvidia RTX 2070 Super GPU

Tutorial for passing through a Nvidia RTX graphics card to a Windows 10 virtual machine using a modified VBIOS

Last update: September 14, 2021

Starting with the GeForce 1000 series, vfio passthrough of a Nvidia GPU has become a little more complicated. If, when starting the VM, you get a black screen, chances are you need to pass along a VBIOS file to the VM so the GPU can properly initialize.

This post is about passing through a Nvidia RTX 2070 Super GPU or any other modern Nvidia GPU to a Windows 10 guest.

Photos from Acre, Israel

This is a selection of photos from Acre, a town in Northern Israel. UNESCO declared Acre, also known as Akko, a “World Heritage Site”. The old city preserves substantial remains of its medieval Crusader buildings beneath the existing Ottoman period town.

Many citizens of Acre, especially those in the old city, live from tourism. Acre has been a popular destination for tourists arriving from abroad, but also Israelis going on a weekend trip. The current CoVID pandemic has practically shut down the old city.

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Photos from Italy

Photos from Italy, including Florence, Arcidosso/Tuscany, and Rome

Photos from our 2019 trip to Italy – Florence, Tuscany, and Rome. Hope you enjoy.

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AMD Radeon 6800/6800XT for VFIO?

Up until November 18, 2020 I would have suggested against the purchase of an AMD GPU for VFIO. But yesterday AMD launched its Radeon RX 6800 line of GPUs. Are the AMD Radeon 6800/6800XT suitable for VFIO?

Remote Backup Script for Windows NTFS Partitions on LVM Volumes

Linux bash script to mount and backup / synchronize a Windows 10 partition inside a LVM volume to a remote backup server using rsync and SSH

I run the bash script below to backup my Windows NTFS partitions residing on LVM volumes to a remote backup server. It uses SSH and public key authentication to authenticate at the remote side.

The script mounts an NTFS partition inside a LVM raw volume. It performs a file-based backup using rsync. It is NOT suitable for system backups!

Please carefully read the “Requirements”, “How it Works”, and “Usage” sections before attempting to use it.