litepcie VS syncthing-android

Hi folks. :)

I'm so glad that my hit-and-run post has been so useful. After seeing Fabien's blog post I did a quick search and it turns out that the solution has spread fairly broadly to other forums. My choice of 0x33 was arbitrary so makes a nice canary for seeing it spread out.

My use case was (and remains) having a Xilinx Artix 7 FPGA in an external Thunderbolt 3 enclosure for testing the development of DSP accelerators using open source tooling. I didn't want to have the FPGA board inside the PC to be able to swap it to my laptop easily, because it produces a lot of heat, and so when I misused the PCIe soft core (litePCIe: https://github.com/enjoy-digital/litepcie/) it doesn't take down the OS. Being able to reload the FPGA and effectively hotplug the device has been very helpful.

Since I knew my issue was around hotplugging I searched for information around PCIe hotplugging and I think (it was two years ago...) that I found the answer from one of these two threads. Both mention the option of reserving PCIe addresses for hotplug busses as a workaround, and a workaround was all I needed.

https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-pci/msg64841.html

https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/35946

dmesg and the various kernel logs are my first stop for any odd behavior on Linux. Especially with any state change to a device (plugging in, turning on, removing, reconfiguring etc) the kernel logs tend to give invaluable info.

I had already been looking at eGPU forums to choose the Thunderbolt 3 enclosure (ended up with the ORI-SCM2T3-G40-GY) and there were various discussions of hotplugging issues there, but I don't think I found the specific kernel options to fix it there.

Check out this docs page for the kernel parameters:

You could try to implement a PCIe root complex for FOSS SoCs, connecting to e.g. Wishbone as the main bus. There's already some DDR3 controller (or this one) and USB Host controller out there, and even device-side PCIe, but no FOSS host-side PCIe that I know of. Probably quite a difficult job though, even sticking to the lower-speed PCIe 1.

I've got another one on topic of self-hosted file sharing:

- FileBrowser running in Docker (https://filebrowser.org/features)

- Syncthing running in another container (https://syncthing.net/)

Syncthing keeps the files on your PC, Mac, BSD systems updated, and FileBrowser can point to the share and supply a convenient web UI. It works for me, it's kind of like a local Dropbox-lite.

We use syncthing to share files between our machines. It avoids is having to use dropbox / OneDrive etc. You just choose a folder and it automatically syncs it in the background.

https://syncthing.net/

This very hn entries is bust contradicting your statement.

Also what about syncthing[1] (for recurrent/permanent sync) and croc[2] (for one time copies) ?

I have used both for a number of years already.

[1] https://syncthing.net/

[2] https://github.com/schollz/croc

I would use syncthing, which is open source at https://syncthing.net/.

After minimal setup, it just works(tm).

You have a normal directory in your filesystem, that is synced to the other peers (which you set up in the "minimal setup").

I have been using it for years, and it works well. It has no problems crossing os'es (i.e. windows -> linux, linux -> mac)

For windows I usually recommend https://github.com/canton7/SyncTrayzor, but vanilla syncthing works fine too (but don't try to mix them!)

Do consider Syncthing particularly if you are using Android. If using apple iOS you'd need the möbius sync client.

https://syncthing.net/

https://www.mobiussync.com/

One thing that it beats the cloud / centralized sync on is because the connection is direct between devices when the initial transfer is completed the file is completely there on the other device. With a cloud type of sync you do the transfer twice. I've seen stack up on large media or with the structure of cloud services pricing making it expensive depending on how your workflow is setup with inside and outside parties. For example, Dropbox deduction from all parties' storage limits not just the sharer.

You can also point Syncthing at a local sync of Dropbox or Google drive and then forward the files to other recipients from that for some purposes.

I think sync is a non-feature, as you can just ride on your existing solution.

For example, I use syncthing [1] with Obsidian to sync files off-cloud.

https://syncthing.net/

When I was 14 and just getting started, I used Notepad. Upgraded to Wordpad when I realized I loved putting italics in every other sentence, moved to Google Docs at around 25 when I started writing on my phone and wanted to sync with my computer, finally moved to Obsidian a few months ago (with Syncthing for syncing) when I decided I don't want to live in Google's house where they can burn my stuff down whenever they want.