Andrew_Stein1
(Lack of Time is the Bane of an Audiophile)
1
New Here…, Thanks for your patience if this is a stupid question. I’m trying to set up a NUC with ROCK. Stuck on this question:
For my NUC model, Intel lists 8 separate driver/firmware updates (7 drivers, 1 firmware) Seems like the thunderbolt and ethernet updates are important…, yes? no? I updated the BIOS, but before I put ROCK on, are any of these required?
I assume those are all recommended inside windows? If so, I think anything you update will get blown away when you install ROCK which brings with and goes to get all its own drivers. But I’m no expert.
I picked a random NUC, surely the same for yours. These drivers are all for Windows. You don’t care about those because you are going to install ROCK, not Windows.
One on the driver list is a Thunderbolt driver for Windows, the other is the Thunderbolt Update Tool also for Windows. It’s not mentioned in the driver description but see the third column. Again from a random NUC page, below. In any case, nothing in ROCK uses Thunderbolt anyway
Just install ROCK, there is no need whatsoever to do anything with Windows. And if you did, installing ROCK would remove it. ROCK is a different operating system and installing it removes anything Windows
ROCK only includes minimum drivers for RoonOS to function. You cannot load drivers or anything other program onto a ROCK OS PC.
ROCK doesn’t necessarily include drivers for all hardware, only what it needs. For example, the NUC hardware might have bluetooth, but, ROCK doesn’t include the drivers to run that hardware, nor, can you load them. So, no Bluetooth.
The OS drive is only used for the OS and cannot be used for music storage or as a backup location.
1 Like
Andrew_Stein1
(Lack of Time is the Bane of an Audiophile)
11
It is odd, though, to think that the Intel Ethernet driver would need to be the latest…, especially since most of these types of updates address security / hacker-prevention, updates. I worry about the back-doors for hackers in my network that exist from the many appliances I have on it (thermostats, alarms, etc) and try to keep the network drivers and firmwares on those types of devices up to date. I would have put the NUC running Roon in that category. But if it’s not necessary, it’s not.
Hardware drivers are in the OS, not the hardware. ROCK uses the Linux kernel and hence the drivers the Linux kernel comes with. I hope Roon keep up with security announcements for remote execution bugs in the kernel, but it’s not as if ROCK has unsecured public interfaces (ARC notwithstanding), and it runs minimal code.
Intel contributes drivers for their hardware to Linux and is quite good at it because the Internet and datacenters everywhere run largely on Linux. Their Windows drivers that they offer for download on the NUC pages are irrelevant in this case. (And anyway an ethernet driver is not a typical remote exploit location, it’s an ethernet driver so an attack vector exploiting a bug there will nearly always be the LAN)
Windows is flawed. The whole architecture is garbage. Some of these drivers include software for the user to “tune” the driver. Commonly its this software which has the security update not the driver. Keep your BIOS updated and leave the rest to ROCK. If you want more control run your own Linux and install server. Then you can very surgically run whatever kernel and kernel modules (drivers) you feel safe running. Of course that’s a ton of work and hours and hours of research… even getting to the level of reading the code?
I’m moving forward. Skipping all these updates.