Looks like the ancient graphics card in my desktop is finally breaking, so I need a replacement. Problem: Passively cooled ones seem hard to find, the only ones I can find are Nvidia GT 710, 730, or 1030 based.

Does anyone have experience how well those chips work with the nouveau driver, or a hint where I could get passively cooled AMD cards? Or at least ones with a very quiet fan?

Assuming the Nouveau feature matrix is up to date, the GT 730 is probably my best option, because video decoding isn’t supported on newer cards…

@airtower I've got a radeon rx 7600 from asrock and I can barely hear the fans.

For the most part my laptop is an appropriate replacement while I wait for the replacement I ordered, but a full Buildroot build… oh dear.

@airtower ooo, that's gonna be.... yeah, spicy. We've done similar things, and yeah, laptops do not like that. In fact they dislike that quite a great deal...

@12 Not sure about spicy, but definitely slow. 8 times the number of CPU threads makes a huge difference, and so does Ryzen 7 instead of some ancient Intel CPU… Interestingly RAM isn’t much of an issue for most of the build.

@airtower we're almost, almost tempted to install Linux on this 650M<Hz UltraSPARC on the second disk just to try make it do a buildroot crossbuild

@12 Now that sounds adventurous… The RPi CM4 based system I’m currently cross-compiling for would probably be faster.

@airtower said UltraSPARC is currently slowly, slowly, slowly building CMake. Slowly. As in she's been at it for two days

@airtower ooof, yeah... buildroot is... yeah. We've done our fair share of buildroot builds, on some very, very sad machines.

@12 I’m reminded of my Gentoo days, and occasionally having to do a full system rebuild for a glibc ABI change or something.

@airtower gods, the RPi. We never liked those, their bllotloader setup always annoyed the hell out odf us. We had this hope that the RPi 4 would, y'know, put 8MiB of SPI flash on the board and bundle EDK2 and call it a day, but nooooo

@12 Yeah, the RPi bootloader is weird. I’m pretty happy with the U-Boot setup I have, I just hope I’ll get to fix its serial support some day (client priorities are elsewhere because, well, we don’t urgently need serial as long as it boots). On this board the available serial does not connect to the default GPIO pins, and U-Boot doesn’t like that.

@airtower ooof, yup, been there. This one is fun, we started with Solaris 10 3/05 with GCC 3.4.3, and had to build an entire toolchain, by hand, to get her up to GCC 9.5.0, and then we've built.... well let's just say that we can now run fucking wordpress, as in, the most recent version, on this thing. For... certain definitions of "run". The initial index.php, for wp-install, took a solid minute to load and render...

@airtower oh wtf? How are you geting uboot then, netconsole? something similarly cursed?

@12 Netconsole for debugging, otherwise headless boot, let U-Boot write to the pins it wants. Luckily there’s nothing wired up where that’d hurt, it’s just not accessible that way (without breaking open this industrial computer box).

@airtower like, we, at least... we come from the android-style world, and the RPi fails *immediately* for not having some kind of hardware-backed root of trust, and some onboard flash that's separate from the actual installed image

@12 I’ve seen in the docs that you can burn a root CA into the board, but that’s about the last thing I want. If I have the hardware, I want it to run what I tell it to.

@airtower that just sounds uteterly cursed, and we appreciate that you also know of the cursed thing that is uboot netconsole. We think you're, like, the first person we've met who does

@12 Took some digging around, and I actually made some additions to U-Boot docs after figuring it out.

@airtower eeeee! well done!

@12 So, this is the thing we’re talking about: https://revolutionpi.com/wp-content/uploads/manuell/datenblatt/Technical_Datasheet_RevPi_Connect-4.pdf
The box is wired up for RS485 from a screw connectors at the top. For a prototype I could break open the box if I needed to, sure, but what I really want is to use that RS485. It works just fine with Linux if you get the DTB right.

@airtower we remember Redboot having a relatively well-known netconsole, and eva or whatever it's called, the bootloader on the Fritz!Box devices having this weird thing where it launches an ftp server on a specific IP for like a second, and you can burn images to the board and use like `quote <command>` in your ftp client to send custom commands. Very weird. Very very weird

@12 I used that about once to get OpenWRT into my router. Luckily updates have worked smoothly, so I didn’t have to repeat it.

@airtower oh, you had one of those? We had the.... 7530, many years ago. Not a bad little router, actually

@12 Have, in active operation (4040)!

@airtower think we ended up installing Freetz on it, realising that it was entirely in German, awkwardly stumbling through getting it set up and switching the fucking language back, and then... we think we ran either Debian or OpenWRT in a chroot off a USB drive

@airtower our brain says "why the fuck doesn't that have an RJ-45 serial port for debugging? everything should have that!"

@airtower niec!

@airtower *niec!

@12 It’s persistent!

@airtower it is, and we are going to bite it!

@airtower we're using a Unifi Dream Router with a TP-Link Deco X80-5G as the upstream because NZ mobile providers offer trash routers for their home 5g service

@12 Oh dear, providers pushing their own routers should be banned. There are a lot of bad things to be said about internet connections in Germany, but at least the right to use your own devices to connect is actually enforced.

@airtower in general, over here you can do the same, except on home 4g and 5g plans. The sim card is actually TAC locked, if you put it in another device it just won't even register

@12 Yikes, that’s horrifying!

@airtower gods we wish we were back in the fucking US

@12 Now that sounds even more horrifying to me!

@airtower ah, but see, the US has *girls*

@12 Ah, yes. I assume this is about specific girls, and not a general absence of girls from NZ?

@airtower mmm, it's more just./.... just.... girls. gay. sfjgilsdfjifglsdgjsdj

@12 Ah, yes, very much understandable!

@airtower we think we're for bed though

@12 Sleep well!

Related question, is there something similar to memtest86+ but for graphics card RAM? The errors look to me like the graphics memory went bad, but I’m curious if I can actually confirm that.

@airtower I think Afterburner had something like that

@ori What’s Afterburner? What shows up in Debian package search is libafterburner.fx-java “minimalistic JavaFX MVP framework” which doesn’t seem fitting.

@airtower ahhhh shit, forgor it is windows only :(

@ori Ah, that explains why I haven’t heard about it.

@pavel I definitely got glitches, just using the desktop, increasing until freeze, that’s why I assume it’s memory.