hardware - Personal Ramblings

On microcode

There has been one too many case of "I don't trust microcode, so I don't want microcode blobs in coreboot", so I felt the need for an answer. And since I don't like stuff to end up in silos, here's a copy. Microcode vs. microcode updatesLet's get this out of

hardware

Seagate's 8TB "Archive" disks

So last year I bought two of Seagate's (comparably) cheap Seagate hard drives for archival, model ST8000A0002, but never was quite happy with them. They came with two different firmware versions (AR13 and AR15), but both hung the SATA bus all the time, corrupted the file system that was on

hardware

Adventures with Intel VT-d (IOMMU)

After spending a couple of weeks of implementing VT-d support in the Muen Kernel, it finally worked today: A device was passed through to a Linux guest while undesired accesses (initiated by the UEFI firmware's USB driver during hand-over) were blocked and reported. The last issue, which took a week

hardware

Trekstor Player Hacks

Nach dem letzten Firmware-Update auf meinem Trekstor Stick (notwendig, weil der Windowstreiber "irgendwie" die vorherige Version gekillt hat), bekam das Dingen die eine oder andere neue Funktion, die ich nun so langsam und experimentell entdecke... Zum Beispiel: Taste "runter"/"leiser" zusammen mit "Vor&