Intel NUC7i5BNH
Setting Up Diamond

Contents

• In the Box
• Assembly Steps
• BIOS Update
• BIOS Setup
• Speed Measurements
• USB Bus Structure on NUC7i5BNH

In the Box

Check the box contents and record serial numbers. Try to get the ethernet MAC address so it can be registered with the firewall. Intel NUCs have the MAC address on a sticker on the bottom.

Beware: This machine has no memory, no disc and no operating system. You will need to obtain your operating system from another source. This of course is simple, inexpensive and legal for Linux.

What's in the box:

• The machine itself.
• VESA mounting plate with 75mm and 100mm squares.
• Package of screws:
  • 4x 2.4 x 3mm (approx), pan head, for disc
  • 4x 3 x 7mm (approx) to attach the VESA plate to the monitor
  • 2x funny shape to attach the NUC to the VESA plate
• M.2 SSD mounting post (in plastic bag)
• Small sticker saying Intel Inside Core i5.
• Power supply (wall wart);
  • Input 100-240V, up to 1.5A, 50-60Hz
  • Output 19VDC, up to 3.43A 65W
  • Dimensions: about 80 x 50 x 24mm, pins at one end, fits in one slot of a plug strip (hanging over the side) if its pins are in a single row.
  • Tail: about 95in = 2.4m long with a Velcro® wrapper for excess length
• Interchangeable pins for the power supply. See below for details.
• Documentation: Setup guide, 39 languages; China RoHS declaration; reference to websites for downloading BIOS, and lists of tested M.2 SSDs, and memory.

The power supply has interchangeable pins. None of them have a grounding pin. For the type letters see the IEC World Plugs website. These pin assemblies are provided:

• Type A, NEMA 1-15P, 2 parallel flat blades; used in North America, Andean South America, Japan.
• Type C, Europlug, pins 19mm apart and 19mm long, 4mm diameter, with lozenge base; used in most of the European Union (except the UK, Cyprus, etc.), Brazil, Korea, Russia, and a long list of other countries.
• Type G, inline blades about 22mm apart center to center, 17mm long, 3mm thick, with a nonconductive (plastic) grounding pin. Used in the UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc.
• Type I, flat blades turned at 60 degrees, about 14mm center to center and 16mm long; used in Australia, New Zealand, Oceania islands, Argentina, and several others. Not in Brazil.
• China could use any of type A, type C or type I. The official standard specifies type I. They often install a combination socket that takes I, C and A plugs.

Assembly Steps

• The side walls of the chassis are aluminum, 2mm thick, and black anodized.

• Leave the plastic film on the top cover until assembly is complete. People say that the cover picks up scratches.

• On the table put a paper towel or eating mat, and a square of aluminum foil over it. Whenever you are handling memory, discs, or any parts inside the NUC, have your bare skin touching the aluminum foil and the chassis of the NUC. It's best not to touch any conductive (metal) parts on the memory, disc or motherboard; handle memory by the edges.

• Remove the screws at each corner of the bottom cover. They are captive; they don't detach from the cover. Pull up on diagonally opposite screws for easier removal. Flip the cover towards the front of the machine.

• Lift up the drive bay and move it to the front (don't need to unplug it) giving access to the motherboard.

• They give you a preinstalled post for an 80mm long M.2 accessory (SSD); leave it alone (unless you're installing one; I'm not), but the post for 42mm is in a plastic bag. Install it now lest you lose it. You need both for an 80mm SSD.

• Insert the memory cards. It will help to make them distinguishable, e.g. write 'A' or 'B' on the labels. Repeat this procedure for each one, starting with the bottom socket. (Designated 'A' in the BIOS.) Stick the memory into its socket, label up, above the visible row of contacts, at about a 30 degree angle, clearing the grabbers of the upper socket. There is a notch that defines the correct orientation. Make it go into the socket so the contacts (103 on each side) are barely visible, well under 1mm exposed. Now rotate the card down flat until the edge grabbers engage. The metal parts of the grabbers should be centered in the notches in the memory card. At this point at most 0.5mm of the card's contacts are visible.

  To remove a memory card, pry outward on the grabbers until they let go (one at a time). Then rotate the card upward 30 degrees and pull it out.

• Insert and screw down the SSD in the M.2 socket, per the setup guide. (I don't actually have a SSD.) There is also a 22x30mm M.2 card for Wi-fi, which is preassembled, and which you should leave alone.

• Slide the 2.5in rotating disc or SSD into the drive bay with the label down. Push it into the SATA connector. Fasten the 2.4x3mm screws, 4 places. Relocate the drive bay inside the chassis. It will be held in place by the bottom cover's screws.

• Replace the bottom cover. Note the arrow pointing to the front. Since the SATA cable pushes the drive bay upward, you may have to shove the cover down, to get the screws to engage.

• The WiFi antennae in the top cover are preassembled; you don't have to mess with them.

• Peel the protective films off the top and front of the machine.

• Apply the Intel Inside and hostname stickers on the front.

• To attach the pins to the power supply:

  • It has a cover over the pin area. To remove it, there is a cutout on the side toward the center of the power supply. Press it down and slide the cover off endwise.
  • The pin assembly has a hook which needs to go toward the center of the power supply.
  • Slide the pin assembly into place endwise, similar to how the cover came off. Push it over the steel pins inside. Continue until the hook clicks, grabbing inside.
  • If you need to use different pins (e.g. when travelling), there is a cutout similar to the one on the cover, which you press, then slide off the pins.

Iris (the 5i5RYH, with memory but no hard disc) wouldn't boot the USB stick. It turned out that I had not completely seated the memory. It gave me 3 blinks on the power button (and would have beeped if speakers or phones were plugged in). Blink and Beep Codes for Intel NUC:

• 3 blinks means a memory error.
• Pairs of blinks means no VGA option ROM. This error is disabled by default in the BIOS.
• 16 fast blinks means excessive temperature.
• Continual blinking occurs during a BIOS update; this is normal.

Function keys while booting: If you have UEFI boot turned on, there is no splash screen with its list of function keys. But it does still respond to the keys, during an about one second interval when the splash screen would have been shown.

• F2 -- Setup
• F7 -- Flash BIOS
• F10 -- Boot menu
• Otherwise, boot from the first existing bootable drive.
• F8 -- Windows recovery mode (off by default)
• F12 -- Network boot (off by default)

Booting from USB storage: Get into BIOS setup by pressing F2 during boot. On the left side of the start screen is the Boot Order panel. Use your USB mouse; shift from the UEFI to Legacy tab. Double click on whichever device, to boot from it immediately. Or you could have used the F10 boot menu.

BIOS Update

Obtain the updated BIOS (before installing the OS). This machine has an Intel Management Engine (IME) and needs a recent BIOS to plug a gaping security hole.

• Obtain a USB memory stick formatted with VFAT and mount it (/mnt suggested).
• Start at Intel Download Center.
• Search for the product, NUC7i5BNH.
• On the results page, restrict the OS to Any Operating System. (Makes your life easier.)
• Pick the latest BIOS update; older versions are also on the list. Current BIOS version is 0060 dated 2017-11-22 (when this is written).
• Which file do I want? I succeeded in using the first one.
  • BN0060.BIO -- to be read by the flasher in the BIOS itself.
  • BNKBL357.86A.0060.BI.ZIP -- DOS-based flasher utility.
  • Each is about 7.5Mb in size.
  • Copy the chosen one to the USB memory stick.
• The BIOS includes a flasher.
  • Insert the flash memory stick containing the downloaded .BIO file. VFAT required.
  • Reboot and hit F7 (repeatedly) as it comes up. Gotcha: if you have UEFI boot turned on, there is no splash screen with its list of function keys. But it does still respond to the keys.
  • You drop into BIOS Flash Update. This page is also accessible from the regular setup on F2.
  • The third line says Unknown Device. Scroll down to this line and hit Enter.
  • It lists all the files whose names end in .BIO (in my case just one). Scroll down to the one you want and hit Enter.
  • After a confirmation box, it reboots and starts flashing the power button light. It shows progress messages; the Main Block Firmware takes the longest time. The whole process took me about 3 minutes. It then reboots normally.
  • If you drop into setup (F2), you can verify that the new BIOS version is installed.

BIOS Setup

• This should be done after the BIOS update because that resets at least some options to factory defaults.

• To get off the home page, click on Advanced in the top row and choose one of the traditional categories. In later pages there is a tab bar with categories in the top row.

• Realtime clock. It's set to civil time in timezone +8, i.e. China. Linux should set this by itself, but just for sanity upon boot, let's change to UTC. Where it says 09:08 next day, change to 01:08 next day. Minutes were 2min off (fixed).

• Boot order: It has UEFI, but need to change to Legacy. Gotcha: there's some kind of weirdness so if you have only Legacy booting it won't recognize your bootable partition. You need to turn on both Legacy and UEFI. Legacy devices are available in this order:

  • SATA ST500LM030-2e71
  • USB: The USB stick
  • LAN (evidently it's really the first to be tried)
  • I left these as is. If a device (like USB) becomes nonexistent, it will be removed from the order, and when it returns it will join at a location that is not first. Use the boot menu (F2) to boot it.
  • You can double click on a device to boot from it instantly.
  • On the Boot page, Boot Configuration tab, Boot Devices list, scroll down to the bottom and disable Legacy PXE booting. It's enabled by default and the default order (which you can't change, apparently) is PXE, SATA, USB.

• Cooling: Control mode is Balanced, with fan off temp = 40C. I changed to Quiet, changing the fan off temp to 45C.

• Performance: I changed these items:

  • Hyperthread: Turned off, this is Linux.

• Security: I didn't change anything. Key items:

  • BIOS and disc passwords: None. In a public computer lab you will want to set these.
  • Enabled features: execute disable; virtualization; VT Directed I/O; Platform Trust Technology (replaces the TPM Trusted Platform Module). Etc.

• Power (primary): Default is max performance; changed to low power. You need to un-check it to pick a different one. If none of the three patterns is chedked, individual controls are shown.

• Power (secondary): Key items; default was unchanged except as noted.

  • After power failure: Stay off. (You could pick reboot.)
  • Power button indicator:
    • S3: Amber, changed to always on (vs blink)
    • S5: Amber, steady, 8% brightness (is the default). I can't see that the light is on.
  • Ring (panel outline) indicator:
    • S3: Changed to yellow (default blue)
  • S4/S5 wake on LAN: changed to enabled, normal boot
  • Wake from S5: changed to enabled
  • Native ACPI OS PCIe support: changed to enabled

• When finished, hit F10 to save and reboot.

Initial Testing

Booting from Diamond's old disc. Power it off. Attach the old disc to the SATA-USB cable and plug that into a USB port. Power on and hit F10 for the boot menu. Select the USB device. See if it boots. Grub loads the kernel and initrd, but it's stuck trying to read /dev/sda2 (which doesn't exist yet) for hibernation. Takes about 2 mins to time out. Continues with normal booting. Diamond is up and on the net. If I had thought of it, I could have edited (in Grub) the kernel command line to omit the resume=/dev/sda2 parameter, avoiding the long timeout.

checkout.sh discrepancies:

• alsa-restore: control values are different, need to regenerate the configuration file. Nothing really wrong.
• baobei.automount using wrong device. Will be OK when disc migrates.
• VPN tester: 1194/IPv4 (only) failed, not going to debug this now. Self-healed later.

Running memtest86+

• Clock 2214MHz X86_64
• L1 cache 32k, 147Gb/s
• L2 cache 256k, 55Gb/s
• L3 cache 4096k, 36Gb/s
• Memory 8Gb, 14.5Gb/s
• CPU temp 47C to 49C
• SMP disabled (1 core)
• In about 3 hours it finished 2.5 passes, no errors.
• Later, 6 more passes in 10 hours almost exactly. No errors.

Copying Old to New Disc:

• Mistake: I booted from the rescue system on an old v42.1 installation DVD. It boots with no problems. But I wanted to use yast2 and the rescue system doesn't have it. So I booted the old disc again.

• /dev/sda (new disc) has no partition table.

• /dev/sdb (old disc) partition table: MSDOS, 500Gb total. Beware, sizes are in powers of 2 unless you use the "units" command, i.e. 1kb = 1024b.

  Nbr	Size	Type	FStype	Flags	Label/role
  1	16.1Gb	Pri	ext4	boot, type=83	root
  2	8.59Gb	Pri	swap-v1	type=82	swap
  3	21.5Gb	Pri	ext4	type=83	home
  4	454Gb	Ext	--	lba, type=0f	--
  5	347Gb	Log	ext4	type=83	s1
  6	52.0Gb	Log	--	type=07	VM #2
  7	55.3Gb	Log	--	type=83	Baobei

• Strategy:

  • I'm going to use YaST to set up partitions on /dev/sda.
  • YaST partitioner's Qt GUI is not installed for some reason; do DISPLAY="" yast2 to get the text (ncurses) GUI.
  • It turns out that this disc accepts sub-cylinder partition boundaries as optimally aligned. Partition 1 is OK at 1Mb. But partition 2 had to be expanded to 38.8Mb. Maybe because it was FAT32?
  • Labels will be 0bbf-root etc. where the prefix is the last 2 octets of the onboard NIC's MAC address.
  • Using GPT; to turn it on, look in the advanced menu on the partitioner's overview page.
  • Mount points have to be unique, e.g. /new-home, because yast partitioner adds them to /etc/fstab and mounts them on the spot.
  • Beware, the partitioner reports locations and sizes in powers of 10, i.e. 1kb = 1000b.

• New partition table:

  Nbr	Size	FStype	Flags	Label/role
  1	1Mb*	--	bios_grub	grub (7.68Mb)
  2	30Mb*	fat16	boot, esp	efi <(38.8Mb)
  3	21.5Gb	ext4	legacy_boot	root
  4	21.5Gb	ext4	--	home
  5	8.0Gb	swap-v1	swap	swap
  6	52.0Gb	--	--	vm2
  7	55.3Gb	--	--	baobei
  8	330Gb*	ext4	--	s1

  (* = will be adjusted or expanded per disc geometry)

• Gotcha: partition 3's legacy_boot flag got lost and it can't be booted. Do parted /dev/sda ; then set 3 boot on . Growl, didn't help. Relevant forum post. On a NUC6CAYH the OP selected legacy boot and disabled UEFI boot, and got the message A bootable device has not been detected (my symptom). Workaround: enable both UEFI and legacy boot. That lets it boot, but it doesn't show the hotkeys or NUC splash screen. It does, however, respond to the hotkeys if you press them during the one second interval when the splash screen would have been shown.

• Copy partitions: ssync -a -x /home/ /new-home/

• Using dd to copy the VM partitions. 100Mb/s on partition 6, 87.5Mb/s on partition 7. (Why the difference?)

• Installing Grub on the new disc: use these commands:
  mount -o bind /proc /new-root/proc
  mount -o bind /sys /new-root/sys
  mount -o bind /dev /new-root/dev
  chroot /new-root
  mount /dev/disk/by-label/0bbf-home /home
  grub2-install /dev/sda #NOT /dev/sda3, you want it in the MBR
  /usr/diklo/lib/daily/grubdflt.J #jimc's fixup script
  exit #From chroot jail
  umount /new-root/dev /new-root/sys /new-root/proc

  It bitches about an improperly nested partition hostdisk//dev/sda,gpt6,msdos2 . The problem was that /dev/sda6 contained a wacked-out set of Windows partitions from an old incarnation of Baobei; #1 was 105Mb long and #2 was 52.3Gb long, which was bigger than the partition. I wiped it. Now grub installation is error free. It was actually successful before, but just for paranoia…

• Boot on the new disc. Power off and disconnected the old disc first. Weird, it wanted to do a network boot despite the new disc being first. I used the boot menu (F10) and it booted. checkout.sh discreps: Only alsa-restore was wrong; created the new ALSA conf file.

• Virtual machine hosting works; both Oso and Baobei started OK. However, Oso has always had network problems on Diamond and continues to do so; I don't want to debug this now, and I moved it to another host. Baobei's networking is fine but its nemesis is power management, specifically shutting down or rebooting, where it gets stuck. It had this problem before and continues to have it. Baobei runs Windows, and a configuration issue in qemu is blamed. I put a lot of work into fixing this with limited success (at least it boots now), but Baobei is mission critical, and we're going to give it a bare metal body.

• Gotcha in hibernation: If Alice is the only user, she can hit Hibernate and it happens. But if there's a root session (via ssh), she is asked to authenticate (root password) to get permission to take the machine down with multiple users on it. And then hibernation does not occur. systemctl hibernate (as root) works.

More Speed Measurements

Speed test on Jimc's benchmark. All numbers are in kbytes/sec.

USB Bus Structure on NUC7i5BNH

Unlike on the Fit-PC Pro and LP, the NUC has only one USB bus and all of the ports connect to it. This bus is provided with a XHCI (USB-3.0) and a EHCI (USB-2.0) controller.