vuxu.org: Hecate

Hecate is a self-built workstation featuring a i5-2400 (3.1Ghz, 4 cores, VT-x, VT-d, AES-NI), 16GB RAM and a 64GB SSD (Crucial m4).

The naming

Hecate is a chthonic Greco-Roman goddess associated with magic, witchcraft, necromancy, and crossroads.

Components

Mistakes

• First, I used a OCZ Vertex Plus 60GB (for 65€). Absolutely don’t buy this model: the controller reproducably locked up (“failed command: FLUSH CACHE”) after a few days of continous usage, and required a hard power-cycle to even be detected by the BIOS again. I have replaced it with a 64GB Crucial m4, which runs fine.

• I planned 2x2TB Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen as a RAID1, but the hard disk prices went to the roof (55€ to 95€, then to 130€) one week before I bought the machine. I’m waiting until the prices go down again before I add disks.

Rough setup

• Flash BIOS version 1.19. Get it here. You can use 7z x to unpack it. Flash with Q-Flash from a USB stick.

• Boot archlinux-2011.08.19.

• Partition scheme: I partitioned manually with fdisk, which automatically 2k-aligned the partitions.

     sda1 128mb /boot ext2 label ssd-boot
     sda2 rest dm_crypt named cryptsdd, -c aes-xts-plain -y -s 512 --align-payload=8192
       lvm volume group "ssd"
         20g / ssd-root ext4 label root
         35g /home ssd-home ext4 label home
  

Base configuration

• grub.conf:

     kernel /vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/mapper/ssd-root cryptdevice=/dev/sda2:ssd printk.time=1 ro loglevel=6
  

• Make ondemand default scheduler in /etc/conf.d/cpufreq.

• Extend logrotate keep times.

• In /etc/pacman.conf, make tar.gz packages instead of tar.xz. (I will directly install them mostly, the compression is a waste of time.)

• Copy old passwd/group/shadow/gshadow.

• adduser, groups: adm,wheel,log,games,audio,video,power,scanner,plugdev

• /etc/fstab: Add relatime to /, /home.

• Add coretemp, acpi_cpufreq, it87, kvm-intel, pcrypt to MODULES.

• Install lots of stuff with packer --noconfirm. Bitch for broken PKGBUILDs.

Hacks

• it87 doesn’t support the Mainboard officially yet, use

  options it87 force_id=0x8720
  

• Enable power-saving for the Radeon HD 5450 (doesn’t help much, but it runs cooler).

  echo auto >/sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile
  

Benchmarks

• Power Usage (desktop configuration)
  • Idle: 41 W, Full load: ~85 W

ChangeLog

• 16jan2012: Update SSD firmware to 0309, using grub4dos like with the BIOS updates for juno.