Aaron44126

Figured out "manually" turning the NVIDIA GPU on and off. Sort of. Took some finessing and I have a bit of work to do yet to make some quick scripts for this. (Maybe other distributions have a better default configuration and don't make this so awkward?) I discovered bbswitch which is a kernel module that can check the status of the NVIDIA GPU and also turn it on and off using ACPI commands. It agreed with nvidia-smi and the runtime_status thing above, stating that the NVIDIA GPU is on even though there are no apps using it. I could not use bbswitch to turn off the NVIDIA GPU because the driver was still loaded, and I could not unload the driver because it was "in use". I used Ubuntu's prime-select script to switch the system to "intel" mode rather than "on-demand" and rebooted. The system booted up on the Intel GPU, with the NVIDIA driver not loaded according to lsmod. bbswitch was still showing the NVIDIA GPU on, but now I was able to turn it off without issue. Then I went through these steps: Use bbswitch to turn the NVIDIA GPU on. (No problem.) Load the NVIDIA driver with modprobe. (Oops, prime-select actually blacklisted it, I had to go and clean that up.) ...That's really it, the NVIDIA driver is now usable (I can run a game on it). Also, nvidia-smi now does not show an Xorg process trying to use it. Now, I still need to figure out how to turn it off after I have loaded the NVIDIA driver once. If I try to unload it with modprobe, it shows an error that it is in use, even though no applications are using it according to nvidia-smi. Unloading the driver is a prerequisite for bbswitch being able to shut the card down. [Edit] Managed to do a power on / power off cycle; if I take care to not allow the "nvidia-drm" module to load then I have no problem unloading the rest of the NVIDIA kernel modules.

Some more messing around over the weekend. I installed "Crossover Linux" and under that I installed Office 365. I was mostly just sort of curious to se if it would work. I didn't want to try to figure out wintricks/etc. to get it working on my own. Crossover did make the install really easy. I'm most interested in being able to run OneNote, but that doesn't seem to be an option for now, it is pretty brittle and easy to crash (never mind the fact that you can't access cloud notebooks). Excel, on the other hand, seems surprisingly robust under Crossover. I used it for a while and had no issues at all. Quicken under Crossover didn't go well. I got stuck at the Intuit account login screen. It wouldn't take any keyboard input or copy/paste. I'd also like to be able to run Adobe applications but I didn't even try that; just from reading, it looks like its a no-go unless you use pretty old versions. It is working way better for me now than what I showed in the video, since I have worked out some performance issues with the VM, but that demonstration is definitely along the lines of what I would experience on a "native" Windows system that had been up for a long time with a whole lot of apps open. Thanks for the pointers here. I haven't messed with any of it yet, but I plan to in the near future. I will note that when I first started messing with this a couple of weeks ago, I observed that nvidia-smi was always reporting that the dGPU is powered on. I read comments online and saw mention that issuing a command to nvidia-smi will force the dGPU to temporarily power on, even if it is to just check the status? I also saw someone state that you can also use this to tell if the dGPU is powered on: cat /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:01:00.0/power/runtime_status (Substituting appropriate PCI device ID) I checked that and it returns "active", so really agreeing with nvidia-smi. Closer inspection of nvidia-smi output reveals that the "Xorg" process seems to be using the dGPU. I will have to see if I can figure out what is going on there. Ha, you may have noticed that I am something of an "all or nothing" person with regards to this project. I'm not going to be switching back and forth between booting Windows and Linux. I don't think I've booted into my Windows install for over a week now (obviously not counting the VM I have going). Anyway, I already spent about half of my Windows gaming time in emulators so this is not something that I am averse to. Also, it looks like about one third of my Steam games have a native Linux port which is a higher ratio than I was expecting.

Having issues with KDE locking up. When it happens, KDE starts to act weird (mouse movement works, some apps are responsive but others are frozen, keyboard input generally doesn't work)... but the system is othersise still up and running – I can log in via SSH, I can still use my Windows VM (via RDP from another system), and I can switch to a console TTY once (if I switch back to the desktop TTY then the keyboard is fully unresponsive and I can't switch anymore). Symptoms seem similar to what these other people are reporting, there are many from March/April indicating that this problem just started "in the last few weeks" so I wonder if some sort-of recent package update has messed things up, or if it just doesn't like kernels newer than Ubuntu 22.04's base 5.15 (they would have dropped 5.19 out for the first time in late February). I haven't found a reported solution. I am really liking KDE in general, but I can't deal with unknown instability so I might be having to switch to something else or back to GNOME. 😕 [Edit] Maybe this is the solution? If so, it's not just Kubuntu, looks like a KDE/Mesa conflict that would be affecting multiple distros. I installed the Mesa update from the PPA referenced; we'll see if this continues to occur. I don't really like being on the bleeding edge like this so if it does fix the problem, maybe I'll try to instead use the Mesa packages from Ubuntu 23.04 (looks like they are new enough to bypass this bug). I already drug the kernel packages over from there.

We also hashed this over in Precision 7X70 pre-release thread last year. The 3600 MHz limitation with 128GB is a limitation of 12th gen Alder Lake, not the CAMM module. (There's an Intel PDF document linked in there confirming the limitation.) There is tons of misleading support material out there from multiple laptop manufactures (even Dell's own marketing material in some cases indicates that it should work at a higher speed than 3600 MHz).

Yes, it is true. Precision 7X70 and 7X80 systems use CAMM modules before the standardization is done, and as you say, there is a chance that the standard could evolve before it becomes more widely used so future CAMM modules would not work in these systems. Dell launched these systems with CAMM to demonstrate their commitment to the standard and that the modules work. You aren't forced to use CAMM in these systems; you can order these systems with a SODIMM interposer and use SODIMM modules instead. Several users here have done so in order to save some money or install their choice of modules. I understand the reservations but I can't really fault Dell's approach here. They're the only manufacturer to get ahead of the problem with SODIMM and put out something that works (other than soldered modules), and they got JEDEC to go along with it. (There's a downside to choosing SODIMM in these systems, though; with only two modules, 64GB is the memory cap... maybe 96GB soon, though, as it does look like 48GB SODIMMs aren't that far off.)

…From last year. I posted a link to this very article in the Precision 7770 prerelease thread here when it was newly posted.

Old news? There was a lot of chatter about this in the Precision threads when it first came up. (My own laptop has a CAMM module.) Since then, JEDEC has blessed CAMM as the next standard for laptop memory and other manufacturers are expected to start using it. (SODIMM is going to have signaling issues as RAM speeds continue to ramp up, so something has to be done, and this is better than soldered memory at least.) https://www.extremetech.com/computing/342342-jedec-says-dells-camm-laptop-memory-tech-will-replace-so-dimm

The key is "burned" into the BIOS these days, it should activate automatically or you can pull the key out with ProduKey; since version 1.70 it can read the key out of the BIOS and will display it in the list. (That tool might generate an antivirus false positive.)

You can try resetting the NVRAM. Hold the power button down for 30 seconds. If successful, the front LED will blink a few times, and then you can try powering on the system again; all BIOS settings will be reset. Other than that, the best thing is to call ProSupport. They are open 24/7. They might have some ideas to kick it into working. Otherwise, they will most likely dispatch a replacement motherboard if they have one available, or if not then you are looking at a system replacement, in which case getting a 7770 or 7780 is likely because I don't think that they have 7760 with Core i9 available to build anymore. (But that also means you're looking at a few weeks for them to build and ship the replacement system.) [Edit] They might dispatch a replacement motherboard and only after some time will you get a notice saying that the part is delayed. This would probably be Monday morning when they actually start looking for the part to ship out. You might not get an alert about this, but it will show on the dispatch status page. If this happens, call them back right away and ask for a system replacement. I have a feeling that if there is a motherboard parts delay, it might be longer than whatever their original projection is (if you even ever get one).

Google Authenticator uses the TOTP standard which is supported by any number of apps. If you go to a website that has Google Authenticator support for 2FA, you can scan the QR code or or type the secret key into (insert your favorite 2FA app here) and it will work just fine. Microsoft Authenticator is an option. It supports the same type of codes. I'm sure there are zillions more options for phone apps. Myself, I hate having this tied to my phone. I use KeePassXC as a password manager on my desktop. It supports also TOTP codes so I just file them in there. I can access them on my phone with the app "KeePassium" which supports the same database format and TOTP codes as well. This is for setting up a new 2FA entry from scratch. As for migrating existing codes off of Google Authenticator and onto a different app, I have no idea... I haven't used Google Authenticator in many years so I'm not sure what import/export functionality it has.

Another question for @Ionising_Radiation, since you've messed with this stuff before (more than I have anyway). I've been reading some stuff and have a few starting points to look at, but I am curious if you have any practical experience or tips to share. Looking at Optimus / dGPU stuff. Do you know anything about how to do things like ... Tell if the dGPU is powered on or not? Tell which app(s) are using the dGPU? Start an app on a particular GPU? Force the dGPU to power off (no apps allowed to use it), in a way such that it can be powered back on without a reboot? So far I have been basically let things operate "by default" and I didn't have to do anything in particular to get games working on the dGPU. But, I'd like to exercise more control over this, make sure that the dGPU is fully powered off when it should be, and let some simpler games like Baba Is You just run on the iGPU. ——— While I had tested some Linux Steam games right away, I did fire up some Windows Steam games (using Proton) for the first time yesterday to see what's what ... I know that there will be issues with some of them, but so far I am impressed with the "it just works" aspect of it all.

It's the battery status light so you will generally only see it light up if the battery is charging. You can tell if the system is powered on from the LED light around the power button, but like you say, if the lid is shut then there's no indication. At least that power button LED is an improvement. Precision 7560 (that I am typing on now) has no power LED indicator at all. Is there an issue with the RTX 4000 Ada getting too hot? I think even that chip is already large enough that there should be no issue keeping it cool at the power level that it would run at in a laptop. (I'll be pretty shocked if RTX 5000 Ada gets more than 5% better performance, if the workload is not vRAM-constrained. That's been about the performance difference expectation between the 4000-level and 5000-level GPUs for the past five or six Precision generations now.)

I was running a big data processing job on my 7560 and the fans were running full tilt for about 24 hours. Now that they have settled down, the right fan has some sort of periodic rocky grind sound going on when it is running at low speed, that wasn't there before. Great. I see a heatsink assembly replacement in my near future.

Windows LTSC is definitely closer to regular Windows 10 than it is to Windows Server. It does exclude a lot of "fluff" though, basically all of the bundled UWP apps and related background services, and it is my choice whenever I can swing it. (I have my own article about it, linked in sig.) I have tried Windows Server on a laptop before and I recall running into some things like it being difficult to get Bluetooth working because required components weren't included and it wasn't obvious how to install them. I've also run into situations where some software (i.e. backup tools) will want you to pay more for a license because you are running on a server OS. But, if you can get past that sort of thing, it should be fine to use. Dell will support Windows 10 LTSC but I doubt that they will support Windows Server, if you have some issue with it. (Sounds like you're comfortable supporting the OS on your own, though...?) I do not think that you would have any trouble setting up Hyper-V VM workloads on Windows 10 LTSC. Regarding 7680 vs 7780, it is basically as you say. The systems are very similar. The main difference is the physical size and 7780 getting an extra NVMe slot. There is a modest performance difference as well, with 7780 getting higher power limits and a slightly beefier cooling system, allowing for both the CPU and GPU to run at slightly higher speeds. One other thing to note is that 7680 has a 16:10 display while 7780 has 16:9, so you get a bit more "desktop working space" on the 7680 even though the screen is technically smaller. With Dell slimming up the bezels and everything, you will see Precision 7680 being a bit smaller than your M4800. Precision 7780 would be larger, but not as large as a Precision M6800.

Microsoft clarifies near-term Windows support roadmap: Windows 10, version 22H2 is the last version of Windows 10. It will be supported until October 14, 2025. A version of Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC will be released in the second half of 2024. (Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC will remain supported past the end of 2025; see details for each version at the top of the first post in this thread.) https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/windows-client-roadmap-update/ba-p/3805227

Finished up yet more scripting to make sure that certain apps/processes stay pinned only on the E cores and with low scheduling priority, and others like games stay pinned only on the P cores with high scheduling priority. I also added scripting to automatically move the Windows VM to the P cores when I am actively using it and to the E cores (with low scheduling priority) when I am not. I also decided to disable Linux's "autogroup" scheduling feature; I don't see any situation where fixes more problems than it creates, for me, since I guess I like to have a strong input in system-wide process scheduling. Playing around with learning how to insert special characters. On Windows, this is holding down the "Alt" key and then keying in a four-digit sequence on the numeric keypad. I have a lot of them memorized that I use regularly, like "—" and "×", and characters that pop up in Spanish like "é" and "ñ" and "¿". On Linux, you press the "compose key" and then key in a two (or more) character sequence to insert a special character. ...So, the Linux way will take some getting used to, but in the end it is definitely more intuitive and easy to "guess" what sequence you will need for more oddball characters that I can't remember the numeric sequence for, like "°" and "÷" and "→" and "©" and "…" and "€" and "≈" and "⅞". I like it so much that I went and installed WinCompose to be able to use the same sequences on Windows. I set the compose key to "right Windows" which is also Fn+Windows on Dell laptops. ————————————————————— I got in touch with a Sabrent person and with no fuss at all I was provided a shipping label to send the broken drive back to them. Only after receiving it will they ship out a replacement. I don't have to pay shipping; it is going to Florida via 2-day FedEx. I won't be able to ship it until tomorrow. I don't actually have anything that I feel comfortable shipping it in. I haven't kept any NVMe drive boxes. I ordered the cheapest NVMe 2280 drive that I could find (128 GB for $12 USD), which should arrive this evening, I will use its packaging to ship out this drive to Sabrent. And from now on, I will always keep at least one empty NVMe drive box around, I guess. Oh, and it turns out that I've been pronouncing "Sabrent" wrong since forever. On the phone recording, I heard that it has a long "a" sound as in "gave" — "Sabe-rent" — whereas I have always been saying it with a short "a" sound as in "rat". Not sure how long it will take me to stop saying it wrong, ha.

Not directly Twitter related, but Tesla/Musk related. Apparently, the new approach to dealing with past statements that come back to bite you is "I don't remember saying that" followed by: Tesla lawyers claim Elon Musk’s past statements about self-driving safety could just be deepfakes https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/27/23700339/tesla-autopilot-lawsuit-2018-elon-musk-claims-deepfakes

3×8TB in my Precision 7770 with no issues. I think it should work fine in Precision 7780. Well. I had trouble with them with RAID mode on (in BIOS setup). I recommend that you run the system in NVMe mode if your drives are "above spec" and use Storage Spaces or some other software solution if you want to combine drives into an array.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/26/23699102/microsoft-phone-link-imessage-ios-iphone-support-available-now It looks like Microsoft is rolling this out to the "general public" with the full rollout to be completed by mid-May. Meanwhile ... I'm still quite satisfied with Beeper, and I can report that it also works just as good on Linux, which I have recently switched over to on my "personal" laptop.

Well, it turns out that having fingerprint authentication enabled will block login to KDE (from SDDM, after a reboot), it just hangs after entering the password, like I experienced when I tried Kubuntu for the first time. Another case of KDE being "rough around the edges". I thought that maybe I wouldn't have to be as "careful" about process management on Linux, but... Last night I was just trying to watch TV in Firefox while also downloading some Steam games in the background. Turns out that Steam is happy to use 100% of 12 CPU cores while downloading and that was causing my video stream playback to stutter and hitch. Solved once I pushed the Steam process to E cores only. So, got to work out a solution to make things like that happen automatically. Process Lasso was really helpful for making this happen on Windows but I am not aware of a similar piece of software for Linux.

I had a lot more "documentation" on NotebookReview before that site went down that has not made its way over here. The project doesn't really have an official web site since NotebookReview went down. I have many competing priorities for my time, and this project went way down on the priority list when Dell changed how fan control works with their 2021 and newer systems. There is no known mechanism to control the fans on their newer laptops at all. Since both of my main laptops are now above this threshold (and one of them is now running Linux to boot), I'm now in a situation where I have to go out of my way to even dig up a system to test with. If someone ever figures out fan control for these newer laptops, I might look into finishing this up. In the meantime, it is pretty much released in an "as is" state. (Anyone is welcome to take the source code and run with it...) There are command line options but they are not designed to be used in conjunction with the GUI. If you give a command line parameter, DellFanManagement will do what you ask and then quit without ever popping a window open. It uses the same parameters as the old "DellFanCmd" program and you can see them just by passing "-?" or any unrecognized parameter to the app. Past builds did have a version number but for now I have just been kicking out occasional development builds without going through the proper release process, so that is why it shows 0.0.0.0 and "DEV" for the version number.

It all makes sense now... If you do not pass the "-a" option to taskset then it does not apply the affinity that you ask for to all of a process's threads, just the main thread. 😕

Thanks, ah well... Well, I successfully scripted out fixes for both the "screen stays on when lid is shut" problem and "automatic lock after 10 minutes doesn't function" problem, both are effectively solved, even if I think it was silly for me to have to do it myself. Also added a second 8TB drive to my RAID0 array for a total of 16TB capacity. The array reshaping was pretty slow, just moving at a porky 200 MB/sec (I'm used to Storage Spaces going around 10× that fast for similar operations); it took over 12 hours. It appeared to be CPU-constrained, using 100% time on a single E core. It did complete with zero downtime, and without breaking either of my other drives, so no complaints really. (Haven't heard back from the Sabrent people about my broken third drive... I'll be calling them tomorrow probably.) Oh, and I picked up an "AuthenTec Eikon Mini" USB fingerprint reader, which is supported natively by libfprint with no additional driver mucking required. Seems to be working fine so far. We'll see if it sticks. Messing around with process priority ("nice"/"renice") to prioritize and de-prioritize some things and I had no idea about Linux "autogroups" and how they impact this.

Twitter is apparently happy to give you a free blue check, if you are popular enough ... Even if you're dead. https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/24/23695534/twitter-blue-tick-verification-dead-celebrities

Set up jobs to copy of a bunch of data from my main laptop to my "home server" using rsync (home server is running Windows; thanks WSL for making this easy). Scheduled to run nightly, so less worry about losing files if another drive goes out. I still want to find a solution to "snapshot" certain files more frequently and be able to restore to a snapshot similar to Windows volume shadow copy or Apple Time Machine. I'm looking at restic. @Ionising_Radiation, I am wondering if you have any thoughts on this as a longer-term KDE user. Here's a perfect example of KDE being "rough around the edges"; it is failing at what I would consider to be basic laptop state management. Here's the situation: When I shut the lid, I want KDE to turn off the display (and keep it off until the lid is opened again) but otherwise keep the laptop powered on and running. I'd prefer it if the system also locked automatically, but its not a dealbreaker if it doesn't. In KDE settings under Power Management -> Energy Saving, there is setting with a few options for what to do if the laptop lid is closed. "Lock screen" seems to lock the screen, but not turn it off. "Turn off screen" seems to turn off the screen, but not lock it. Also, if I shut the laptop lid and have KDE turn off the screen with this option, and I wiggle the mouse around while the lid is still shut, the screen turns back on, even though the lid is still shut. (I have a USB mouse connected so it is impossible to pick up the laptop and move it without triggering mouse motion.) In addition to the heat coming from the system, the screen creates its own additional heat that is trapped in there when the lid is closed so I don't feel comfortable just leaving the display on in this case. I actually noticed this problem to begin with because the lid seemed hotter than normal! Googling around, I just see people resorting to scripts to get the behavior that they want. You can tell KDE to execute a script on certain events, but I already have a script running an infinite loop to do my fan management so I'll probably just add screen management in to that. cat /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state will tell me if the lid is open or shut. xset q | grep Monitor will tell me if the display is on or off. So I can repeatedly poll to see if the lid is shut but the display is on, and if so, I can turn the display off with xset dpms force off. (I don't use external monitors with this system, but if I ever do I can adjust accordingly.) At least it is easy to do this stuff with one-line shell commands in Linux, it would be much more awkward to do in Windows and I'd probably resort to writing a small program. ...Anyway, I'm still wondering if there is a better way just using KDE settings...? [Edit] Realized that the "automatically lock after X minutes idle" setting is not working either. I had it set to 10 minutes, but just bumped it down to 1 minute, and it won't automatically lock. (I see other KDE users complaining about this as well, it might be tied to having some other power saving option disabled.)