okay since this thread got necrobumped 3 times this month I may just as well post some small update with funny stuff I encountered xD
ASM3142 from AliExpress…
So first thing - I decided to get some offsite backup. My previous setup based on 7 separate WD Elements drives but it started to be very cumbersome and clunky solution so I decided to look for HDD enclosures and decided to get two of ICY BOX enclosures.
And oh boy - what a ride that was. I’m not gonna quote too much from that thread since anyone interested can follow link but TL;DR - turned out those enclosure REALLY don’t like AMD USB controllers. Up to point where they plain don’t work. Unfortunately my
was only 5G so I decided to upgrade and buy one from AliExpress again - this time ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM3142 USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 xHCI Controller. Which is 10G. Well… it SHOULD be 10G…
And it kind of is… but is it though? That’s the AliExpress quality bites your a*s part xD
And well it probably wouldn’t be that bad if I had it routed to front panel… but I don’t. I mean it’s too freaky to waste my only 10G usb-c port on front panel for this crap. But at the same time I need to connect stuff directly to it (without hub) to reach 10G speeds sooo… eh…
duct tape.
I need to take off dust filter every time I want to connect SSD and it’s absolutely terrible ghetto rig but well… if it works it works right?.. >.>
I don’t yet know if there’s anything that can be done here, I kind of don’t want to buy second one because all those ASM3142 adapters from AliExpress look like the same rebrand in 1000 names and I’m almost certain I’ll end up with 2 broken USB-C controllers…
TPM on AMD… as always…
When I was looking at diagram of my motherboard I noticed TPM header. Golly gosh, would it be cool to have physical TPM right? After all some dude in some internetz said fTPM bad so it sure must be better to go with physical one right? It’s pennies also so why not!
So I bought ASRock TPM module for my motherboard and plugged it in. Very tiny thing wow. Switched to SPI header in BIOS and called it a day. It seemed to work fine at first though performance of it was quite terrible. /dev/hwrng was getting 1.5 kB/s throughput while my laptop hardware TPM generates like 17 kB/s. But you know like… whatever. I used PC for few days and I realized at some point that…
My Thunderbolt docking station doesn’t work… Because my VM with pci-e passthrough of network card in that TB3 dock didn’t boot up with missing hardware error… It’s like complete brick. I’m connecting cable and there’s just nothing in dmesg. Sometimes wild “pciport: Cannot find switch at position 0” came up few times but then radio silence followed that.
Must be docking station right? Probably power supply got bad or something. We had power surge that week. I borrowed identical dock from work aaaand it also didn’t work…
*shocked pikachu*
I had a stroke for a while because I thought TB3 controller on my precious motherboard might be dead but after few hours of hopeless troubleshooting I tried to remember if anything changed in my workstation last week… and the only thing I thought of was TPM. But it can’t be TPM right? I mean why would it? How the hell would TPM be ever related to Thunderbolt in any way?..
…
it was TPM.
I do not know yet why it happens or whether it should happen. I’ll try reaching out to ASRock support and ask whether they ever tested TB3 controller working with external TPM module but for now I just disabled that TPM module. I couldn’t find any info in the internet regarding TB3 not working with external TPM. Sad. :<