Recently I’ve been following progress on support for the Rockchip RK3588 System-on-Chip in mainline Linux. I have been using a RockPRO64 single-board computer based on Rockchip’s previous top-end SoC RK3399 for several years as a media centre running Kodi, on Debian with a mainline Linux kernel (plus some patches for improved multimedia support from the LibreELEC project).
I’ve been pretty satisfied with the support for RK3399 in mainline Linux, as opposed to a vendor BSP based on an old kernel like 4. Read More...
This weekend I figured out how to set up multipath routing with Oracle Cloud’s Site-to-Site VPN. I have been using Oracle Cloud for a while as they have a generous “Always Free” plan for their 64-bit ARM virtual servers. To create a site-to-site connection between my home network and the Oracle Cloud network, I use their IPSec Site-to-Site VPN service. This type of VPN is made up of two IPSec tunnels, with different endpoints on the Oracle side, though strangely you can only specify one IP address for the endpoint on your side of the tunnels - Oracle calls this the Customer Premises Equipment or CPE. Read More...
I recently wanted to automate building a headless Debian testing (codename “buster”) virtual
machine, hosted on macOS, and it turned out to be somewhat more complicated than I expected, so I
thought I’d document it here for others’ benefit.
Instead of installing VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion or Parallels which are quite heavyweight virtual
machine apps, I wanted to run a headless VM using QEMU, which can be installed easily using
Homebrew. QEMU now supports hardware accelerated x86 virtualisation on Macs using the
Hypervisor.framework built in to macOS.
The script and preseed file to perform the fully automated install is here, and I’ll explain
the details behind what it does in this post.