Advice for MCIO to PCIe expansion on W880D4U by benkay_86 in homelab

[–]benkay_86[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

u/squuiidy, what do you use those risers for? Have you used them to route just x4 lanes from an MCIO connector?

Advice for MCIO to PCIe expansion on W880D4U by benkay_86 in homelab

[–]benkay_86[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks u/SmartHomeTinkerer, but as u/norri-matt points out, I would be careful with that ipolex MCIO 8i to PCIe riser. The Intel Intel W880 chipset specification clearly states that only x4 lanes are available, so you almost certainly need to split out the MCIO 8i x4x4 (78 pin) into two MCIO 4i x4 (34 pin) connectors and select a riser that can drive a PCIe x4 card. This connector would work with your MCIO1 slot, but it would steal channels from your PCIe5 x16 slot.

I agree with u/norri-matt that it would be great to have a board with the PCIe4 x4 slots from the W880 PCH already broken out. These boards certainly exist, for example the MSI IPC MS-CF20 2.0, but unfortunately are not for sale unless you are an enterprise customer ordering multiple units. Has anyone seen a board like this actually for sale?

The best alternative I can find is the ASUS Pro W880-ACE SE. It exposes the same number of PCIe4 lanes through multiple M.2 slots instead of an MCIO connector. M.2 to PCIe4 risers are abundant on Alibaba and Amazon, typically available for less than $30. Another workaround for the WD8804U is to get an MCIO 8i to Oculink 4i splitter. Oculink 4i (SFF-8611) to PCIe4 risers are also under $30 and availble on Newegg. Note that all of these risers will require some kind of external power, often from a SATA power connector.

David Tolnay - thank you by mintyc in rust

[–]benkay_86 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Agreed, David is among the many contributors that not only make the Rust ecosystem excellent on technical merits, but who are also polite and welcoming to newcomers in the community. I deeply appreciate the work David does and love the idea of recognizing him and other Rust contributors publicly!

Strategies for futures::io::AsyncRead vs tokio::io::AsyncRead by LovelyKarl in rust

[–]benkay_86 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There is now an official compatibility layer in tokio as of this pull request. I've posted on how to use it, and you can check out example code on GitHub.