Month: May 2024

Running Concept2 Utility in a VM

I recently found myself needing to transfer some old workout data from my Concept2 PM3 and its associated Logcard. However, as I didn’t have easy access to a Windows machine, and Concept2 only provides their utility software for Windows and Mac, I was compelled to run it in a Windows VM.

Upon connecting the PM3 to my computer and redirecting the USB device to the VM, I encountered an issue: the Concept2 Utility failed to recognize the connected PM3. In an attempt to resolve this, I downgraded the Concept2 Utility to an older version, 6.54. This version did recognize the PM3, but it still failed to recognize the Logcard.

The solution I found was to add the PM3 as a USB host device, rather than using USB redirection. This can be accomplished via the VM’s hardware details page by selecting Add Hardware -> USB Host Device, or by using the following XML configuration:

<hostdev mode="subsystem" type="usb" managed="yes">
  <source>
    <vendor id="0x17a4"/>
    <product id="0x0001"/>
  </source>
  <address type="usb" bus="0" port="3"/>
</hostdev>

The Vendor ID/Product ID (VID/PID) shown above corresponds to the PM3’s VID/PID. If you’re using a different monitor, you may need to adjust these values accordingly.

For reference, here is an example of how the PM3’s VID/PID appears:

Bus 003 Device 004: ID 17a4:0001 Concept2 Performance Monitor 3

Additional details about the setup include:

  • Windows 10 VM
  • QEMU/KVM virtualization via virt-manager
  • Concept2 Utility version 7.14

Regenerate Dracut initramfs images from a live USB

Thanks to an incompatibility between dracut and systemd version 256, I was left with an unbootable system. I booted a live USB system, downgraded systemd back to 255, but I had to regenerate the initramfs images to be compatible with my old systemd.

While using systemd-nspawn is convenient for modifying the system from a live USB, generating dracut initramfs images through it resulted in missing hardware support (for example, no nvme module) due to the abstracted hardware in the container. The solution is to revert to the traditional chroot and generate the images from there:

$ sudo /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-cryptsetup attach root /dev/nvme0n1p3
$ sudo mount /dev/mapper/root /mnt/
$ sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt/boot/
$ sudo mount --bind /dev/ /mnt/dev/
$ sudo mount --bind /proc/ /mnt/proc/
$ sudo mount --bind /sys/ /mnt/sys/
$ sudo chroot /mnt/
# dracut -f --regenerate-all