Heiko Sieger, Author at Heiko's Blog

Traveling to Spain with the Nikon Z8 or Nikon Z7 II?

In June this year I embarked on a 6-week photography trip to Spain and other places in Europe. A few days before the departure I received the brand new Nikon Z8. I wanted to travel light, only a small camera backpack and a boarding trolley. But which camera should I pack – the Nikon Z8 or Nikon Z7 II?

The dome in front of the mihrab of the Great Mosque of Cordoba

Kernel 6.0 and VFIO

Kernel 6 not booting with VFIO – workaround

Recently I upgraded to kernel 6.0 on my Manjaro rig, but that didn’t go well. The PC booted but there was no screen output. I was able to ssh into the Manjaro host, though.

Searching for an answer led me to the “Linux Kernel 6 seems to be incompatible with the vfio_pci module needed for PCI passthrough” on Level1Techs. If you go further down the thread, you’ll see how someone posted a working solution “Using the driver_override feature“.

Chromatic Aberration Removal in Lightroom

Chromatic aberration (CA) or “color fringing” is a color shift or distortion usually along high contrast edges in a photo. The wider the lens, the more likely it is that you’ll find color fringing in the picture. Old or inadequate lenses can also contribute to color aberration, so does shooting at a wide aperture.

New NTFS Driver in Kernel 5.15

Linux kernel release 5.15 introduced a new NTFS file system driver named NTFS3. This kernel driver was originally developed by Paragon Software as a commercial solution (more about the ntfs3 driver can be found on their FAQ page).

NTFS3 is not to be confused with NTFS-3G, a user space driver that employs the FUSE or “file system in user space” approach. There is a 3rd driver available – simply NTFS – that was shipped as the standard NTFS driver on Linux, but it lacked support for many of the Microsoft NTFS features (like writing to disk). Most of us dealing with NTFS drives have installed and use the NTFS-3G driver.

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.

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.

Graphics Cards: AMD vs Nvidia

Updated on December 7, 2021

A question that frequently pops up in VFIO or GPU passthrough forums is which graphics card to buy: AMD or Nvidia? And the answer often depends on whom you ask.

Some people will tell you to stay clear of Nvidia graphics cards since their driver detects the virtual machine and quits.

Others mention the “reset bug” that’s been haunting AMD graphics cards for the last couple of years (see Wendells video interview of Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman). So what’s the story?

Creating a Windows 10 kvm VM on the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X using VGA Passthrough

Last updated: January 6, 2022

Introduction

I’ve already written a detailed tutorial on Windows 10 kvm VGA passthrough based on QEMU version 2.11. Years have passed and recent distributions like Ubuntu 20.04, Linux Mint 20, or Manjaro come with QEMU 4.0, 4.2 or 5.1.

A lot has happened since version 2.11. QEMU 4.0 includes numerous changes and improvements such as trim support in the virtio-blk driver, pcie-root-port with PCIe 4.0 support (with Q35-4.0 machine type), as well as improved audio.

Hardware upgrade or what’s holding me back?

More than a year has passed since I’ve posted about building a new PC. So what is holding me back from the upgrade? Time and money are considerations, but not the reason.

On paper, the AMD Ryzen 9 has outperformed Intel in most if not all tasks. The Ryzen 9 3900X beats the Intel i9 9900K as well as the Intel i9 10900X in multi-threaded workloads. The Intel i9 9900K can barely hold its ground on single-threaded tasks. Numerous benchmarks have shown that AMD is a clear winner.

Impact of Spectre and Meltdown Protection on Virtual Machine Performance

A year ago I wrote about the 2D graphics performance impact of the Windows 10 (1803) update inside a virtual machine. As it turned out, the performance impact was related to the Spectre vulnerability patch that Microsoft had introduced. However, the same patch had practically no performance impact on a Windows 10 bare-metal installation.

Time has passed and I wanted to see if there has been any progress. Right now I’m running Windows 10 (1903) with Nvidia driver release 431.36. Windows 10 is up-to-date, Nvidia however already offers a newer version (431.60).