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fabiosun

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An interesting discovery: Whilst attempting to get OBS broadcasting software working with Baremetal and Decklink x8 speed PCIE card.

 

If you run the above under Bare Metal and booting from a m2 boot OS and your TRX40 Motherboard is fully populated with PCIE-E cards as well as shared NVME m2 drives there is a strong possibility that you will experience crashes and corruption or your PCIE card will not work correctly due to shared memory space switching.

 

I had been using an m2 Catalina boot drive which I discovered shared the same mem space as the x8 Decklink card. ie OBS or BMD Desktop Video Express wouldn't work correctly - no SDI inputs were showing video from cameras Id attached. Sometimes it would simply freeze. As you know, I have 2 x AMD Radeon VIIs in my machine (thats two x16 pcie slots), a Fireface 800 on a Firewire card (using x4 PCIE lane but occupying x8 in BIOS) plus the Decklink 8K Pro (which requires a x8 PCIE). Add that to the shared m2 slots and you can see theres going to be corruption or problems like above when trying to get the cameras to show in OBS or write to hard drive.  Indeed, I experienced partition errors whilst trying to use the m2 boot with all those PCIes.

 

However, if I booted to a SATA boot drive copy of my Catalina OS the Decklink card was fine - everything worked and never crashed. I could still write back to the m2 drives but the fact that I was using a SATA boot (that wasnt shared on the PCIe lanes) meant I had no mem / PCIE crashes or freezes.

 

So, please remember to bare in mind if you are fully using all m2 slots, and all PCIE lanes (inc Thunderbolt) GPUs, sound cards etc... that you may experience problems on your boot drive or other memory clashes/freezes.

 

So in my case, now I only use a SATA boot drive for the OS and  I do all my speed writing (encoding/drive intensive stuff) to m2 drives which are NOT sharing memory with PCIe lanes.

 

Lesson learned.

 

Update: Also, some programs (and games like Steam CS:Go) work in BM from a SATA drive but NOT from a m2 boot drive!

 

* With Proxmox  it kinda works, but I was getting the occasional glitch using Decklink and all pass thru PCIes. Sometimes the Decklink would just 'lose' camera inputs or the device just went missing.

 

So for me Bare Metal works best on a SATA boot. End of.

 

Edited by Driftwood
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5 hours ago, valmeida said:

I did the update booted just fine with my Vega 64 but it won't boot with the Radeon 6900 XT  😭

 

Screen Shot 2021-02-17 at 6.33.51 PM.png

I can boot Catalina with my 6900  with no acceleration of course but not  Big Sur any ideas ?

Edited by valmeida
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7 hours ago, Jaidy said:

@Ploddlesdo you know why has Gigabyte not released F4n BIOS to public yet? I've been using it since you posted it a while back and it seems very stable. Is it to enable the Zen3 TRs when they come out?

 

I don't have any problems with it either. Gigabyte are always pretty slow on releasing updated BIOSs, but as it is working fine for me I'm not worried by them not updating their website with it.

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Has anybody tried the new Beta 2 of BS 11.3, it seems it has been re-released as "macOS Big Sur Beta 11.3 (20E5186e)", i.e. gone from 'd' to 'e'?

 

I'm guessing it is just a minor update to fix the install corruption if you don't have enough free disk space because the installer fails to check.

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  • Supervisor
5 hours ago, Ploddles said:

Has anybody tried the new Beta 2 of BS 11.3, it seems it has been re-released as "macOS Big Sur Beta 11.3 (20E5186e)", i.e. gone from 'd' to 'e'?

 

I'm guessing it is just a minor update to fix the install corruption if you don't have enough free disk space because the installer fails to check.

i cant because system does not detect a new beta if you have "d" version

 

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no it is not strange, in many MSI firmware with some ram and in some condition..it happens

however, if you have windows installed check with cpu z o similar memory frequency you should see similar value

in Asus Board there was a settings which allowed to have right (visual output) for memory frequency..in MSI I did not find its correspondence 

not a great problem for me..it is like unknown on CPU description

 

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Has anyone worked out their max PCIe lane bitrification resources?

 

For example, my Asrock TRX40 Creator board has the following resources:-

 

USB 3.2 2 x 2 in pci M2_4,  the wifi adapter in M2_WIFI_1, and three m2 drives populating M2_1, M2_2, and M2_3. (not sure how many lanes they occupy)

I have three SSD drives attached to SATA ports 5, 6 and 7. ( how many lanes do SATA controllers/ports in use, use?

The 3970x cpu supports 64 PCIE lanes, my 4 PCIe mobo slots occupy 2 x16 lanes (32) in slot PCIE1 and PCIE3, 1 x 8 lane in Slot PCIE2 and 1 x 4 lane in slot PCIE4.

So I think my question relates to which TRX40 Creator lanes is shared with SATA/m2/PCIE slots? 

 

Am I right in saying that each SATA SSD will use 4 PCIE lanes?

Note: I'm using three SSD SATAs (Proxmox, Mac OS clone from m2, Windows boot). I'm using three m2s (Mac OS boot 2tb MP600, another MP600 m2 for scratch disk, a Sabrent 8TB m2 for sample libraries and video raw/h264 originals)


How many lanes do the WIFI and USB 3.2 M2 slots consume?

Which SATA ports clash with which PCIE Lane M2 ports?

What happens if Im out of resources - is it supposed to auto manage shared resources (cuz it doesnt do it properly with certain software)?

Is there a map anywhere detailing shared lanes resources for TRX40 with similar board setup?

 

Just trying to get to the bottom as to why certain PCIe devices work under SATA boot, but NOT m2 boot!

 

I outlined in an earlier post that if I boot from the m2 Mac OS, OBS and the Decklink cards show black (no) video. Steam and games like CSGO dont work.

 

If I boot the mirrored Mac OS copy from an SSD drive, both the above software work fine - and I see video coming in from the SDI inputs on the Decklink card. So somewhere there is a clash of PCIE resources when booting from the m2 drive.

 

When I boot from the SSD Mac OS mirror, I see no problems writing data to any of the m2 drives! This is all rather perplexing. 

 

Any tips or experience in this matter would be appreciated.

 

UPDATE: Asrock tell me there is no sharing of PCIe lane resources on the Asrock Creator unlike other AM4 or other mobos.
Whilst the cpu takes care of the main PCIe slots (2 x 16, 2 x8) plus the m2_1 and M2_2 drives 2 x 4 pcie lanes, there is a x8 bus connector going to the TRX40 chipset which handles the third  M.2 Slot_3 / Gen4 using x4 (with SATA Type)*

*  maybe there is my clash!? Anyone know what that means?

 

The TRX40 chipset x8 bus also handles the Aquantia net card which takes x 2 PCIe lanes, and the RTL8125 (which has been replaced with a Broadcom) and the WIFI CARD take x1 PCIE lane each. Plus, the TRX40 chipset handles the ASM3242 USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Single type C ( rear port ) which uses x4 lane. What I cant get my head around is that this x8 lane bus connector to the chipset is able to handle upto x12 lanes!?

 

 

A 3970X CPU handles 64 PCIe Lanes therefore;-

 

CPU PCIE lane layout

PCIE lane slot 1 Radeon VII = x 16 PCIe Lanes

PCIE lane slot 2 Decklink 8K Pro SDI Input Video card =  x 8 PCIe Lanes

PCIE lane slot 3 2nd Radeon VII GPU =  x 16 PCIe Lanes

PCIE lane slot 4 Firewire card (a x4 card) occupying the x 8 slot = x8? or x4? PCIe Lanes

1st M.2 Slot / Gen4 MP600 m2 drive = x4 PCIe Lanes

2nd M.2 Slot / Gen4 - another MP600 m2 drive = x4 PCIe Lanes

CPU to AMD TRX40 Chipset PCIE Gen4 BUS Lane = x 8 PCIe lanes

 

Total = 64 PCIE Lanes

 

AMD TRX40 Chipset PCIE layout (allegedly x8 PCIe lanes taken from the cpu total)

3rd M.2 Slot / Gen4  (with SATA Type) - Sabrent Rocket 8TB m2 = x4 PCIe Lanes

ASM3242 - Rear side USB 3.2 2x2 Type C PCIe Gen3 = x 4 PCIe lanes

Mini PCIe slot - Acquantia AQC107 =  x 2 PCIe Lanes

Mini PCIe slot - RTL8125 = x 1 PCIe Lanes

Mini PCIe slot - M.2 WiFi - Intel AX200 / replaced with Broadcom =  x 1 PCIe Lanes

 

Total = 12 PCIe Lanes

 

As you can see the x8 PCIE lane CPU to TRX40 chipset bus only has x8 lanes 

So why is there 12 PCIe lanes coming off it?

 

Does anyone know that what they really mean by the 3rd M.2 Slot / Gen4  saying "with SATA Type" means you can plug an M.2 SATA (aka M+B key) into an M.2 NVMe (M key) or that it means it disables a SATA port when you use the M.2 slot?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Driftwood
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  • fabiosun changed the title to [Discussion] - TRX40 Bare Metal - Vanilla Patches

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