[rescue] A somewhat modern rescue -- some PCI questions

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Sat, 26 Oct 2019, Doug McIntyre wrote:

> PCIe x16 cards... Furthermore, they seemed to have gone out of their
> way to choose a AMD onboard video chip that was super low-end, like
> you would only stick this machine away in the datacenter and never
> look at its console.

Probably more because it was a chipset that played well with the
remote-console feature of DRAC.

> Some people I've heard, have taken some PCIe x8 to PCIe x16 extenders
> so that a video card could be slotted in. I'm not sure how well this
> worked, theoritically, the card/chip would just use the available
> channels to it, albiet at half the capacity of normal.
>
> Or others have modified the x8 slot to let the x16 card stick out the
> end of it, but again I'm not sure how well that may have worked
> either.

Both of these solutions will likely work, as most PCIe graphics cards use
16-lane slots more for power delivery than throughput[1].  With Dell's
firmware, it's quite likely that the add-in graphics card won't be usable
until the OS initializes it.


[1] Many, if not most, multi-x16 slot enthusiast boards only route 4 or 8
     lanes to the slots when more than one x16 slot is in use.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke   |   "The more you mess with it, the more you're
Austin, TX          |    going to *have* to mess with it."
USA                 |                            --Gearhead Proverb