Steam on EL6 (RHEL6 / Scientific Linux 6 / CentOS 6)

The fact that Steam have decided to only officially support .deb based distributions, and only relatively recent ones at that has been a pet peeve of mine for quite some time. While there are ways around the .deb only official package availability (e.g. alien), the library requirements are somewhat more difficult to reconcile. I have finally managed to get Steam working on EL6 and I figure I’m probably not the only one interested in this, so I thought I’d document it.

Different packages required to do this have been sourced from different locations (e.g. glibc from fuduntu project, steam src.rpm from steam.48.io (not really a source rpm, it just packages the steam binary in a rpm), most of the rest from more recent Fedoras, etc.). I have rebuilt them all and made them available in one place.

You won’t need all of them, but you will need at least the following:

glibc-2.15-60.el6.i686.rpm
glibc-2.15-60.el6.x86_64.rpm
glibc-common-2.15-60.el6.x86_64.rpm
glibc-devel-2.15-60.el6.x86_64.rpm
glibc-headers-2.15-60.el6.x86_64.rpm
libtxc_dxtn-1.0.0-2.1.i686.rpm
SDL2-2.0.3-2.el6.i686.rpm
steam-1.0.0.39-2.i686.rpm
xz-5.0.5-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
xz-compat-libs-5.0.5-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
xz-libs-5.0.5-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
xz-lzma-compat-5.0.5-1.el6.x86_64.rpm

First install some the dependencies from the standard distribution packages:

yum install gtk2-engines.i686 \
            openal-soft.i686 \
            alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686 \
            gtk+.i686

The install the updated packages:

rpm -Uvh glibc-2.15-60.el6.i686.rpm \
         glibc-2.15-60.el6.x86_64.rpm \
         glibc-common-2.15-60.el6.x86_64.rpm \
         glibc-devel-2.15-60.el6.x86_64.rpm \
         glibc-headers-2.15-60.el6.x86_64.rpm \
         libtxc_dxtn-1.0.0-2.1.i686.rpm \
         SDL2-2.0.3-2.el6.i686.rpm \
         steam-1.0.0.39-2.i686.rpm \
         xz-5.0.5-1.el6.x86_64.rpm \
         xz-compat-libs-5.0.5-1.el6.x86_64.rpm \
         xz-libs-5.0.5-1.el6.x86_64.rpm \
         xz-lzma-compat-5.0.5-1.el6.x86_64.rpm

If you have pyliblzma from EPEL installed (required by, e.g. mock), updated xz-lzma-compat package will trigger a python bug that causes a segfault. This will incapacitate some python programs (yum being an important one). If you encounter this issue and you must have pyliblzma for other dependencies, reinstall the original xz package versions after you run steam for the first time. Updated xz only seems to be required when the steam executable downloads updates for itself.

Finally, run steam, log in, and let it update itself.

One of the popular games that is available on Linux is Left 4 Dead 2. I found that on ATI and Nvidia cards it doesn’t work properly in full screen mode (blank screen, impossible to Alt-Tab out), but it does work on Intel GPUs. It works on all GPU types in windowed mode. Unfortunately, it runs in full screen mode by default, so if you run it without adjusting its startup parameters you may have to ssh into the machine and forcefully kill the hl2_linux process. To work around the problem, right click on the game in your library, and go to properties:

Click on the “SET LAUNCH OPTIONS…” button:

You will probably want to specify the default resolution as well as the windowed mode to ensure the game comes up in a sensible mode when you launch it.
Add “-windowed -w 1280 -h 720” to the options, which will tell L4D2 to start in windowed mode with 1280×720 resolution. The resolution you select should be lower than your monitor’s resolution.

If you did all that, you should be able to hit the play button and be greeted with something resembling this:

ATI cards using the open source Radeon driver (at least with the version 7.1.0 that ships with EL6) seem to exhibit some rendering corruption, specifically some textures are intermittently invisible. This leads to invisible party members, enemies, and doors, and while it is entertaining for the first few seconds it renders the game completely unplayable. I have not tested the ATI binary driver (ATI themselves recommend the open source driver on Linux for older cards and I am using a HD6450).

Nvidia cards work fine with the closed source binary driver in windowed mode, and performance with a GT630 constantly saturates 1080p resolutions with everything turned up to maximum. I have not tested with the nouveau open source driver.

With Intel GPUs using the open source driver, everything works correctly in both windowed and full screen mode, but the performance is nowhere nearly as good as with the Nvidia card. With all the settings set to maximum, the performance with the Intel HD 4000 graphics (Chromebook Pixel) is roughly the same at 1920×1200 resolution as with the Radeon HD6450, producing approximately 30fps. The only problem with playing it on the Chromebook Pixel is that the whole laptop gets too hot to touch, even with the fan going at full speed. Not only does the aluminium casing get too hot to touch, the plastic keys on the keyboard themselves get painfully hot. But that story is for another article.

QNAP TS-421 – Review, Modification and RedSleeve Linux

Requirement

With the RedSleeve Linux release rapidly approaching, I needed a new server. The current one is a DreamPlug with an SSD and although it has so far worked valiantly with perfect reliability, it doesn’t have enough space to contain all of the newly build RPM packages (over 10,000 of them, including multiple versions the upstream distribution contains), and is a little lower on CPU (1.2GHz single core) and RAM (512MB) than ideal to handle the load spike that will inevitably happen once the new release becomes available. I also wanted a self contained system that doesn’t require special handling with many cables hanging off of it (like SATA or USB external disks). I briefly considered the Tonido2 Plug, but between the slower CPU (800MHz) and the US plug, it seemed like a step backward just for the added tidyness of having an internal disk.

Specification

The requirements I had in mind needed to cover at least the following:
1) ARM CPU
2) SATA
3) At least a 1.2GHz CPU
4) At least 512MB of RAM
5) Everything should be self contained (no externally attached components)

Selection

Very quickly the choice started to focus on various NAS appliances, but most of them had relatively non-existant community support for running custom Linux based firmware. The one exception to this is QNAP NAS devices which have rather good support from the Debian community; and where there is a procedure to get one Linux distribution to run, getting another to run is usually very straightforward. After a quick look through the specifications, I settled on the QNAP TS-421, which seems to be the highest spec ARM based model:

CPU: 2GHz ARMv5 Marvell Kirkwood (same as in the DreamPlug but 66% higher clock speed)
RAM: 1GB (twice as much as DreamPlug)
SATA: 4x 3.5″ SATA disk trays, based on the excellent Marvell 88SX7042 PCIe SATA controller
eSATA: 2x
Ethernet: 2x Gigabit (same as DreamPlug)
USB: 2x 2.0, 2x 3.0

Disks

At the time when I ordered the QNAP TS-421, it was listed as supporting 4TB drives – the largest air filled that were available at the time. I ordered 4x 4TB HGST drives because they are known to be more reliable than other brands. In the 10 days since then Toshiba announced 5TB drives, but these are not yet commercially available. I briefly considered the 6TB Helium filled Hitachi drives, but these are based on a new technology that has not been around for long enough for long term reliability trends to emerge – and besides, they were prohibitively expensive (£87/TB vs £29/TB for the 4TB model), and to top it all off, they are not available to buy.

Overview

Once the machine arrived, it was immediately obvious that the build quality is superb. One thing, however, bothered me immediately – it uses an external power brick, which seems like a hugely inconvenient oversight on an otherwise extremely well designed machine.

In order to make playing with alternative Linux installations I needed to get serial console access. To do this you will need a 3.3V TTL serial cable, same as what is used on the Raspberry Pi. These are cheaply available from many sources. One thing I discovered the hard way after some trial and error is that you need to invert the RX and TX lines between the cable and the QNAP motherboard, i.e. RX on the cable needs to connect to TX on the motherboard, and vice versa. There is also no need to connect the VCC line (red) – leave it disconnected. My final goal was to get RedSleeve Linux running on this machine, the process for which is documented on the RedSleeve wiki so I will not go into it here.

Modifying

One thing that becomes very obvious upon opening the QNAP TS-421 is that there is ample space inside it for a PSU, which made the design decision to use an external power brick all the more ill considered. So much so that I felt I had to do something about it. It turns out the standard power brick it ships with fits just fine inside the case. Here is what it looks like fitted.

It is very securely attached using double sided foam tape. Make sure you make some kind of a gasket to fit between the PSU and the back of the case – this is in order to prevent upsetting the crefully designed airflow through the case. I used some 3mm thick expanded polyurethane which works very well for this purpose. The cable tie is there just for extra security and to tidy up the coiled up DC cable that goes back out of the case and into the motherboard’s power input port. This necessitated punching two 1 inch holes in the back of the case – one for the input power cable and one for the 12V DC output cable. I used a Q.Max 1 inch sheet metal hole punch to do this. There is an iris type grommet for the DC cable to prevent any potential damage arising from it rubbing on the metal casing.

The finished modification looks reasonably tidy and is a vast improvement on a trailing power brick.

One other thing worth mentioning is that internalizing the PSU makes no measurable difference to internal temperatures with the case closed. In fact, if anything the PSU itself runs cooler than it does on the outside due to the cooling fan inside the case. The airflow inside the case is incredibly well designed, hence the reason why it is vital you use a gasket to seal the gap between the power input port on the PSU and the back of the case. To give you the idea of just how well the airflow is designed, with the case off, the HGST drives run at about 50-55C idle and 60-65C under load. With the case on they run at about 30C idle and 35C under full load (e.g. ZFS scrub or SMART self tests).

Virtualized Gaming: Nvidia Cards, Part 3: How to Modify 2xx – 4xx series GeForce into a Quadro

here has been a large amount of interest in the previous two articles in this series and many calls for a modifying guide. In this article I will explain the details of how to modify your Fermi based GeForce card into a corresponding equivalent Quadro card. Specifically, you the following:

GEFORCE MODELGPUQUADRO MODEL
GeForce GTS450GF106Quadro 2000
GeForce GTX470GF100Quadro 5000
GeForce GTX480GF100Quadro 6000

The Tesla (2xx/3xx) and Fermi (4xx) series of GPUs can be modified by modifying the BIOS. Earlier cards can also be modified, but the modification is slightly different to what is described in this article. There is no hardware modification required on any of these cards. The modification is performed by modifying what is known as the “straps” that configure the GPU at initialization time. The nouveau project (free open source nvidia driver implementation for Xorg) has reverse engineered and documented some of the straps, including the device ID locations. We can use this to change the device ID the card reports. This causes the driver to enable a different set of features that it wouldn’t normally expose on a gaming grade card, even though the hardware is perfectly capable of it (you are only supposed to have those features if you paid 4-8x more for what is essentially the same (and sometimes even inferior) card by buying a Quadro).

The main benefit of doing this modification is enabling the card to work in a virtual machine (e.g. Xen). If the driver recognizes a GeForce card, it will refuse to initialize the card from a guest domain. Change the card’s device ID into a corresponding Quadro, and it will work just fine. On the GF100 models, it will even enable the bidirectional asynchronous DMA engine which it wouldn’t normally expose on a GeForce card even though it is there (on GF100 based GeForce cards only a unidirectional DMA engine is exposed). This can potentially significantly improve the bandwidth between the main memory and GPU memory (although you probably won’t notice any difference in gaming – it has been proven time and again that the bandwidth between the host machine and the GPU is not a bottleneck for gaming workloads).

Another thing that this modification will enable is TCC mode. This is particularly of interest to users of Windows Vista and later because it avoids some of the graphics driver overheads by putting the card in a mode only used for number-crunching. Note: Although most Quadros have TCC mode available, you may want to look into modifying the card into a corresponding Tesla model if you are planning to use it purely for number crunching. You can use the same method described below, just find a Tesla based on the same GPU with equal or lower number of enabled shader processors, find it’s device ID in the list linked at the bottom of the article, and change the device IDs using the strap.

Before you begin even contemplating this make sure you know what you are doing, and that the instructions here come with no warranty. If you are not confident you know what you are doing, buy a pre-modified card from someone instead or get somebody who does know what they are doing to do it for you.

To do this, you will require the following:

  • NVFlash for Windows and/or NVFlash for DOS
    Note: You may need to use the DOS version – for some reason the Windows version didn’t work on some of my Fermi cards. If you use the DOS version, make sure you have a USB stick or other media set up to boot into DOS.
  • Hex editor. There are many available. I prefer to use various Linux utilities, but if you want to use Windows, HxD is a pretty good hex editor for that OS. It is free, but please consider making a small donation to the author if you use it regularly.
  • Spare Graphics card, in case you get it wrong. If you are new to this, your boot graphics card (the spare one, not the one you are planning to modify) should preferably not be an Nvidia one (to avoid potential embarrassment of flashing the wrong card). Skip this part at your peril.

On Fermi BIOS-es the strap area is 16 bytes long and it starts at file offset 0x58. Here is an example based on my PNY GTX480 card:
0000050: e972 2a00 de10 5f07 ff3f fc7f 0040 0000 .r*..._..?...@..
0000060: ffff f17f 0000 0280 7338 a5c7 e92d 44e9 ........s8...-D.

The very important thing to note here is that the byte order is little-endian. That means that in order to decode this easily, you should re-write the highlighted data as:
7FFC 3FFF 0000 4000 7FF1 FFFF 8002 0000

This represents two sets of straps, each containing an AND mask and an OR mask. The hardware level straps are AND-ed with the AND mask, and then OR-ed with the OR mask.

The bits that control the device ID are 10-13 (ID bits 0-3) and 28 (bit 4). We can ignore the last 8 bytes of the strap since all the bits controlling the device ID is in the first 8 bytes.

This makes the layout of the strap bits we need to change a little more obvious:

Fxx4xxxx xxxxxxxx xx3210xx xxxxxxxx
   ^                ^^^^
   |                ||||-pci dev id[0]
   |                |||--pci dev id[1]
   |                ||---pci dev id[2]
   |                |----pci dev id[3]
   |---------------------pci dev id[4]
F - cannot be set, always fixed to 0

The device ID of the GTX480 is 0x06C0. In binary, that is:
0000 0110 1100 0000
We want to modify it into a Quadro 6000, which has the device ID 0x06D8. In binary that is:
0000 0110 1101 1000

The device ID differs only in the low 5 bits, which is good because we only have the low 5 bits available in the soft strap.

So we need to modify as follows
From:   0000 0110 1100 0000
To:     0000 0110 1101 1000
Change: xxxx xxxx xxx1 1xxx

We only need to change two of the strap bits from 0 to 1. We can do this by only adjusting the OR part of the strap.

It is easier to see what is going on if we represent this as follows:

ID Bit:   4                  32 10
Strap: -xxA xxxx xxxx xxxx xxAx xxxx xxxx xxxx
Old Strap:
AND-0: 7F        FC        3F        FF
       0111 1111 1111 1100 0011 1111 1111 1111
OR-0:  00        00        40        00
       0000 0000 0000 0000 0100 0000 0000 0000
New Strap:
AND-0: 7F        FC        3F        FF
       0111 1111 1111 1100 0011 1111 1111 1111
OR-0:  10        00        60        00
       0001 0000 0000 0000 0110 0000 0000 0000

Note that in the edit mask above, bit 31 is marked as “-“. Bit 31 is always 0 in both AND and OR strap masks.
Bits we must keep the same are marked with “x”. Bits we need to amend are marked with “A”.

So what we need to do is flash the edited strap to the card. We could do this directly in the BIOS, but this would require calculating the strap checksum, which is tedious. Instead we can use nvflash to take care of the strap rewrite for us, and it will take care of the checksum transparently.
The new strap is:
0x7FFC3FFF 0x10006000 0x7FF1FFFF 0x80020000
The second pair is unchanged from where we read from the BIOS above. Make sure you have ONLY changed the device ID bits and that your binary to hex conversion is correct – otherwise you stand a very good chance of bricking the card.

We flash this onto the card using:
nvflash --index=X --straps 0x7FFC3FFF 0x10006000 0x7FF1FFFF 0x00020000
Note:
1) The last OR strap is 0x00020000 even though the data in the BIOS reads as if it should be 0x80020000. You cannot set the high bit (the left-most one) to 1 in the OR strap (just like you cannot set it to 0 in the AND strap). Upon flashing nfvlash will turn the high bit to 1 for you and what will end up in the BIOS will be 0x80020000 even though you set it to 0x00020000. This is rather unintuitive and poorly documented.
2) You will need to check what the index of the card you plan to flash is using nvflash -a, and replace X with the appropriate value.

Here is an example (from my GTX480, directly corresponding the the pre-modification fragment above) of how the ROM differs after changing the strap:

0000050: e972 2a00 de10 5f07 ff3f fc7f 0060 0010 .r*..._..?...`..
0000060: ffff f17f 0000 0280 7338 a597 e92d 44e9 ........s8...-D.

The difference at byte 0x6C is the strap checksum that nvflash calculated for us.

Reboot and your card should now get detected as a Quadro 6000, and you should be able to pass it through to your virtual machine without problems. I have used this extensively to enable me to pass my GeForce 4xx series cards to my Xen VMs for gaming. I will cover the details of virtualization use with Xen in a separate article. Note that I have had reports of cards modified using this method also working virtualized using VMware vDGA, so if this is your preferred hypervisor, you are in luck. Quadro 5000 and 6000 are also listed as supported for VMware vSGA virtualization, so that should work, too – if you have tried vSGA with a modified GeForce card, please post a comment with the details.

The same modification method described here should work for modifying any Fermi card into the equivalent Quadro card. Simply follow the same process. You may find this list of Nvidia GPU device IDs useful to establish what device ID you want to modify the card to. The GPU should match between the GeForce card the the Quadro/Tesla/Grid you are modifying to – so check which Nvidia card uses which GPU.

Many thanks to the nouveau project for reverse engineering and documenting the initialization straps, and all the people who have contributed to the effort.

In the next article I will cover modifying Kepler GPU based cards. They are quite different and require a different approach. There are also a number of pitfalls that can leave you chasing your tail for days trying to figure out why everything checks out but the modification doesn’t work (i.e. the card doesn’t function in a VM).