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Now running on Wyse
August 23rd, 2019
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Sorry for not posting sooner, but I was voluntold to do inventory at a
different store from my home location at work... So I've been dealing
with that for roughly 12-hours-a-day all week. Fun. Fun. Anyway, the
cables I wanted to get my new Wyse Dx0Q running came in right in the
middle of inventory... The cables I ordered were StarTech SATAEXT30CM for
SATA data (ASIN B008635ATO), and "Benfei 15 Pin SATA Power Y-Splitter
It should be noted that the male ends of these cables do NOT fit the Wyse
Dx0Q mainboard right out of the box, they have a bit of a shroud that
will have to be removed with either a box cutter, dremel, or x-acto knife
before it will attach... It's not a big deal at all, if you have even a
smidgen of common sense, it's extremely easy to modify these cables to
fit the mainboard; I did it and I was not even sober!!
Other notes about the power connector: I do not know if the Wyse mobo
implements sata power pins 1-2 (3.3VDC power), 3 (3.3 VDC power/PWDIS),
11 (SSU and/or HDD activity LED), or pins 13-15 (12VDC).
I also do not know if the pin length on pins 3, 4, 7, 12, and 13 are
longer than the rest on the mainboard are longer than the rest; this is
important for hot swapping with motorised drives, SSDs should be fine to
hot-add, regardless if true hot swapping is supported offically or not.
(comments on the unknown bits are greatly apppreciated!)
Switching from my old server to the new Wyse was very simple, first thing
I did was remove the SATA DOM from the Wyse and then powered the machine
on and enabled legacy booting (my previous machine was BIOS, not UEFI)..
The Wyse is a UEFI machine, some UEFI machines will not allow enabling
legacy booting if the primary disk is bootable in pure UEFI mode... Not
sure if this is the case with the Wyse, but I did not want to take the
chance (again, comments appreciated!); it almost goes without saying that
secure boot should rightly be disabled in legacy boot mode as well.
After doing the very minor modifications, I simply inserted the SATA SSD
from my old machine. That was it as far as firmware and hardware goes!
Upon booting Alpine Linux on the new Wyse, I have discovered a few
interesting things:
The system has the usb_early_handoff quirk, at least in legacy boot mode.
Works fine in 4.19.67 regardless.
PCI/PCI express hotplugging is not supported, at least when the UEFI is
fully in control of ASPM...
The EHCI controller also has some issues when UEFI is fully in control
of ASPM, it will be perfectly stable, but may use a marginal amount of
additional power
The realtek RTL8211E NIC has some slight issues when UEFI is fully in
control of ASPM... Realtek NICs are finnicky,
***Please check your UEFI settings and set ASPM to OS controlled if your
firmware revision allows it!***
UEFI ESRT support for doing firmware updates is not supported, at least
in legacy support mode... Consequently I highly recommend updating UEFI
to the latest available version (to, for instance, having the latest AMD
microcode loaded as early as possible) ASAP.
The ACPI _PSD table says that all cores on the machine must use the same
P-state, this is complete and utter bullshit, and is apparently set that
way to make Microsoft Windows happy. Linux 4.19.67 ignores the _PSD
table, and will set CPU core P-states independently of each other.
The i2c-piix4 driver DOES NOT WORK, is dangerous (read: potential crash),
and should be blacklisted on every extant Linux kernel that I know of
currently as-of this posting date. Newer versions of the kernel will
prevent the driver from doing anything dangerous, but it may logspam, so
please blacklist that driver. Seriously, it does nothing for you. Kill it
with fire.
The machine has a hardware watchdog timer, it has been supported since
2011 roughly wiht the sp5100_tco driver. Awesome.
All-in-all the quirks I listed above are a very small number of quirks,
and modern versions of Linux should be able to handle most of them, the
most helpful thing you can do is to set ASPM to OS controlled (if
possible) or disabled in UEFI. It should also be noted that the UEFI
revision that my machine has in it when I wrote this whole post was
08/05/2013, I plan on upgrading it shortly.
Someone in the comment section asked about power draw, according to my
Kill-a-watt EZ, the system typically draws 9.5 watts, and according to my
UPS (Cyberpower CP1350PFCLCD), it draws 8 watts. When the system is
booted to the stock Windows and placed into standby, the Kill-a-watt
reports 0 watts; clearly it's still consuming a minescule amount of power
as the NIC and keyboard remain powered.
Anyway, I'm going to go figure out how to update the UEFI firmware.
Will post more later.
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Comments have been left on this post:
how do measure hardware draw?
Posted Sat Aug 17 01:10:38 UTC 2019 by 46.182.18.29
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I use either a Kill-a-watt EZ or the built-in power meter on my UPS
(CyberPower CP1350PFCLCD) when I do measurements myself.
Any WYSE wattages I have posted about before today came from David
Parkinson's website https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/d/dx0q/
Intel TDP numbers are from Intel ARK: https://ark.intel.com
Posted Sat Aug 17 21:15:01 UTC 2019 by zcrayfish
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please post more about this. I'm currently running a Z90 as a home
server https://grosu.nl/systems/wyse.html
Posted Mon Aug 19 00:33:52 UTC 2019 by 217.19.24.30
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Hi. I have checked your gopher.zcrayfish.soy and i see you
Posted Wed Mar 18 16:06:52 UTC 2020 by 127.0.0.1
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