Linux, Newest Kernel, Old Hardware, Windows 10

I just had to do this post!  August will be 4 years of great performance for this Dell Precision 7710.  Kudos to Dell for great hardware design. I did an in depth review here in August 2016, Linux, Newest Kernel, Newest Hardware, Windows 10 when I first set up the system.

First, big Shout Out to one of my best friends and co-workers that introduced me to Debian, Nate!  Thanks for all the tips and support over the years.  Even though you couldn't keep up w/ the bleeding edge that is... testing! LoL

Next, I must say the folks at Oracle have done great at keeping VirtualBox Free to use at home, and stable enough to keep upgrading the same VM for four years.  Also, great work with the new VBoxSVGA graphics controller with 3D acceleration.  It not only works great, but screen resize and responsiveness with graphics intensive applications is flawless, even on this older Quadro M!

Microsoft, I'm shocked.  I thought for sure I would be wiping this VM at some point. Never did I think it would be running my entire Windows Experience flawlessly virtualized with Office, VPN and Updates for years.  I have almost 4 years of content packed in there!   I even use the USB passthrough with Web Cam and Smart Card reader, to support the use of Skype!

Last but not least, Linux Debian community.  Your packaging and persistence to compatible releases and regression tests has helped keep us Debian users stable.  At this point I'm running on Buster, and have made significant upgrades.

I can't recommend this configuration enough.  Only down side has been the Broadcom 5580 Smart Card reader, which has been broken in Virtualbox for at least 10 years.  USB card readers work just fine.

I should also say I spent a few years doing photogrammetry development.  That means this machine's CPU has been pegged at 100% for >24 hours continuously, while enormous amounts of disk have been consumed and deleted, with thousands of small to large (4GB+) files.  It is an absolute work horse.

I've also carried this thing around the U.S. and dragged it through airports and scanners on multiple occasions.  The disk is still encrypted with LVM, and I've updated the password more times than I can remember at this point.

Pleased to say I am now smoothly running with:

VirtualBox 6.1.10
Windows 10 Pro Build 18362.19h1_release.190318-1202
Debian 4.19.118-2+deb10u1 (2020-06-07) x86_64 GNU/Linux

The only question now is, when do I get a new PC?  I still have 32 GB of RAM, 8 Logical CPUs running on a 6th Gen Core i7.  The GPU is totally adequate for almost all workloads, and the SSD SMART logs show no issue with the hard drive.  Wifi is fine, as well as sound.  All pluggable ports work well and the Keyboard and mouse pad has no issues or stuck keys. The backlighting for the keyboard still works as well.

One thing I did not cover in the original post (because I must have not seen the error) is the microcode for the Intel Chipset.  Make sure to install that if you see the TSC_Deadline Failure during boot. This was a "WARNING" i saw for years and ignored.  It may have effected performance but I didn't notice.  Nevertheless, I aim to understand all errors on my Linux PC, and solve them.

From Stack Exchange:

TSC deadline support is nice to have, but not vital. The kernel has an elaborate framework for timekeeping and timed event handling; TSC deadline is one possible implementation of event handling, but not the only one. On CPUs which support it, it is nice to have though, because it’s very efficient.

To upgrade your microcode and hopefully re-enable TSC deadline support, you can install the microcode update packages from Debian’s contrib and non-free repositories. To do so, edit your /etc/apt/sources.list to ensure that your Debian repository definitions include main, contrib and non-free; then run

# sudo apt update

followed by

# sudo apt install intel-microcode

(for Intel CPUs) or

# sudo apt install amd64-microcode

(for AMD CPUs). Once that’s done, reboot, and your microcode should be updated. If TSC deadline support is re-enabled, you won’t see the error message at boot, and you’ll see tsc_deadline_timer in the flags lines of /proc/cpuinfo.

The Debian wiki has more information on microcode updates.

Linux, Newest Kernel, Latest Hardware, Windows 10

About eight years ago I installed Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, which I believe was Ubuntu 8.10.  I had a Dell desktop at work and they just rolled out, "Trusted Desktop".  The original intention of trusted desktop is simply to ensure an end-user's workstation is safe, free of viruses, and has the most recent security updates.  This helps to keep malware and attackers out of the corporate network when users plug in to it daily.

The problem for me is that because the corporation was so large, they did not ask or care about the developer's needs.  The first version of trusted desktop they rolled over top of Windows XP completely removed Administration capability, as well as installed several incompatible drivers and encryption software combinations.  Eventually these systems began showing the "Blue screen of death", and crawling to a halt under the poorly designed implementation of trusted platform computing.

At this point I saw where Windows was going with my company and discovered they would "allow" employees to use Linux if they signed a waiver and ensured they implemented a compliant disk encryption policy.  So I was off, installing Ubuntu, Virtualbox and Windows XP VM to support Windows specific work software I needed to use.  In this case it was mostly Microsoft Office and the ActiveID client drivers for my smartcard to work with the VPN software.

I didn't need wireless because this was a desktop plugged in at work.  However I did have two outputs on my video card and hoped I would be able to run a similar dual head/monitor display, the way I had been doing on XP for a couple of years.  I quickly had flashbacks of trying to get wireless drivers working on Mandrake Linux, circa 2004.  It was only a bit painful getting Ibex to use my Radeon correctly, but after all of this I was content for about a year.

Unfortunately, a year later support for 8.10 died out, and it was time to upgrade to 9.04, Jaunty. In that release, support for my old ATI Radeon GPU was dropped in favor of the newest version of X that was shipping w/ Jaunty.  I felt betrayed by the Linux community for leaving my crappy old GPU behind.  I had no idea how to write my own driver then, had my own work to do, and so I gave up and went back to Windows XP and then 7 for a long time.  Of course, later I would provide systems support for about fifty developers running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, but this topic would cause us to digress as I usually do.

Well, this past week I have gone back to Linux, this time choosing Debian Jessie 8.  I chose Debian because I am feeling unsure about where Canonical will be taking Ubuntu in the future, and I wanted something I was already familiar with in regard to package management.  For example, I have recently used a Slackware 10 distribution on an old laptop I have, but it leaves much to be desired in regard to community support for the latest hardware.

After choosing Debian for my OS, I got a new Dell Precision 7710 laptop.  This thing really packs a punch with:

• Intel® Core™ i7-6820HQ CPU @ 2.70GHz
• Intel Skylake GPU w/ CPU
• Nvidia® Quadro® M3000M w/4GB GDDR5
• 32GB (4x8GB) 2133MHz DDR4 SDRAM, Non-ECC
• Hynix 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Class 40 Solid State Drive

You can imagine my disappointment when after 8 years passing since I ran Linux on Dell for my personal system, my desktop booted with a notification that my Cinnamon desktop was being rendered in software mode.  Furthermore, my wireless interface was nowhere to be found.

The first issue was with a feature in the BIOS being enabled called Optimus.  I don't want to make this entire post about Optimus, so I'll use a reference from Wikipedia. "Nvidia Optimus is a computer GPU switching technology created by Nvidia which, depending on the resource load generated by client software applications, will seamlessly switch between two graphics adapters within a computer system in order to provide either maximum performance or minimum power draw from the system's graphics rendering hardware."

Apparently the Dell supported version of Ubuntu knows how to handle configuration this correctly.  However, Debian Jessie out of the box could not.  I chose not to attempt to enable Optimus (Optimux would have been a better name.) support on Debian, but found some interesting work here, https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Optimus/ that may assist if you choose to do so.  For me, I have simply disabled the setting in the BIOS, and have opted for the NVidia GPU to be my primary display adapter.  Perhaps later I will investigate Optimus further.

However this led me to my next issue, in that my GPU is not yet supported by Nouveau.  The Quadro M3000M is part of the Maxwell-2 series.

NVIDIA Quadro Mobile Specification Comparison (High-End)
	Quadro M5000M	Quadro M4000M	Quadro M3000M
CUDA Cores	1536	1280	1024
Memory Clock	5GHz GDDR5	5GHz GDDR5	5GHz GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
VRAM	8GB	4GB	4GB
FP64	1/32	1/32	1/32
TDP	100W	100W	75W
GPU	GM204	GM204	GM204
Architecture	Maxwell 2	Maxwell 2	Maxwell 2

A quick review of the list at https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/CodeNames/ will show you that this GPU is not supported.  So, I had to install the bundle available from Nvidia.  The important thing to remember when bundling the manufacture's driver is to ensure DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support) is installed and that Nvidia uses DKMS to manage the kernel module between kernel updates.

So with my GPU now working, it was time to figure out the issue with my wireless.  A quick `lspci | grep Wireless` resolved,

02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 8260 (rev 3a)

The firmware for Intel wireless adapters generally ends up in a package called, 'iwlwifi' and once installed on most systems, will match the vendor id on your hardware during modprobe, and load the correct module.  As luck would have it, this card's module was not added/patched until November 2015.

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi/pcie/drv.c?id=4ab75944c4b324c1f5f01dbd4c4d122d2b9da187

This means my driver doesn't really show up until the November 2015 timeframe, which is kernel 4.3.  Turns out Debian has backports up to Kernel 4.6! So, upgrading with the backports should include the firmware for my wifi card.  Backports warns you to only update a package if you NEED it, and encourages you not to upgrade everything.  However, so much depends on the Linux kernel, that upgrading that specific package creates a dependency for many other backport requied packages.  As a result, I ended up using backports for pretty much all of my software.  Which is Virtualbox, X, and Gnome3.

To perform this upgrade, first gloss over, https://backports.debian.org/Instructions/.  Then, after you have added the backports repo, run the following,

$ sudo apt-get -t jessie-backports install linux-image-amd64

Once this is complete, rebooting your PC should prompt you for the latest kernel at the Debian GRUB screen, in my case this is 4.6+74~bpo8+1.  If I understand this naming convention correctly, it means

"Linux Kernel 4.6, Build number 74, Backport for 8.0 Build 1".  Which is quite the mouthful.

As a bonus, the above kernel will also include support for the latest bluetooth adapter!  The end result of all this work was a bleeding edge opensource operating system using Virtualbox 5.0 (from backports) which has USB 3.0 support and 3D acceleration!