A month or so ago I came across a vlog from Brian Lunduke, in which he mentioned "Linux From Scratch". It sounded like a neat and fun way to setup a Linux box. I played around a bit in a VM on performing the first couple of steps, and decided my next system install would be a LFS based system.
In some ways this new LFS build can dovetail with my Big Speech plans. Once this new machine is up and running I will have an improved platform for hosting experimental builds in VMs. In addition the machines being retired from daily use will provide additional hardware for lower-level drivers and bare-metal for my proposed hypervisor/microkernel system I plan to include in the OS. An additional plus is the knowledge I will gain on putting together a fully bootable and customized system from source. The downside is the new machine will still provide gaming distractions from making good progress on my long term goals.
Yesterday I just finished building the new system, which is intended to replace both my existing file server, and my primary gaming rig. In addition I designed the system to handle running additional VMs as specialized servers and for development purposes.
My new system specs are as follows:
- AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X CPU
- ASRock X399 Taichi Motherboard
- Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 Cooler
- 4x 16 GB Crucial ECC Memory
- On back-order, will replace the 8GB Patriot memory when it arrives.
- 2x4 8 GB Patriot Memory Kit
- Temporary, needed to test remaining components within the return window, and start on the system build and install.
- Not sure what I will do with this stuff once my server memory arrives...
- Rosewill THOR v2 ATX case
- 2x Rosewill hot-swap 5.25" - 3.5" cages
- Changes the 6x 5.25" cages in the case to 8x 3.5" hot swap drives.
- Rosewill 1200w PHOTON Power supply
- Corsair 1.92 TB NVMe M.2-2280 SSD
- Boot drive.
- Will provide a small non-redundent root ZFS pool for KVM/qEMU operations.
- Will provide ZFS L2ARC space.
- May provide ZFS non-redundant fast temporary scratch space.
- WD Black 500G NVMe M.2-2280 SSD
- Will provide ZFS ZILs for pools needing good network sync performance.
- May provide a native windows partition for dual boot if I find use cases that don't work in a VM with Looking Glass.
- ... Still Gotta Game and VR!!!
- Will provide scratch space for LFS source/build bootstrapping.
- PowerColor RX570 Red Dragon GPU
- Primary server video.
- Planned as the display for Looking Glass
- NVIDIA Reference GTX 980 GPU
- In current game machine.
- Will be VFIO/OVFM pass through to the Win10 gaming VM.
- Will perform transplant once I am ready to start setting up Looking Glass.
- LSI Logic SAS 9207-8i Storage Controller LSI00301
- Using a pair of SAS to 4-port SATA cables to control drives in the hot swap cages.
- HTC Vive's Intel WiGig 11100VR 60GHz adapter (1x PCI-e)
- In current game machine.
- Will be VFIO/OVFM pass through to the Win 10 gaming VM.
- Will perform transplant once I am ready to start setting up Looking Glass.
- Miscellaneous hard-drives.
- Combination of currently in-use and not-yet used drives.
- Will be importing, migrating, or transferring existing storage pools from current ZFS server.
- Eventually all existing drives (or replacement/upgrades) from current file server will be moved into this new, much larger case.
In my next blog post I plan to document the initial LFS install steps.
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