I don't understand the kernel problem. Why did he feel he had to rebuild the kernel weekly? When the amdgpu stopped working why couldn't he just go back to the last working kernel?
The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment
21–30 of 89 posts
Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without pain? I mean, there is pain when using Linux. It just works better than, say, Windows.
I just setup Gentoo on a Lenovo laptop last week. It was the least painful process for a Linux laptop of my entire career. Everything just works. Even sleep and the fingerprint sensor for sudo. LLM tuis replaced Google entirely. I can't even say there was any pain whatsoever. The experience is now more akin to MacOS circa 10.6.x years.
Was it a Snapdragon laptop? Because if it wasn't, then it has nothing to do with the OPs question.
Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment
#23I see the problem, but I don't see a clear analysis on the actual source of the problem. I assumed the issue was mainly single core performance, but he is also suggesting context switches could be the cause? So could you fix that with a new scheduler? Or you just need another SoC with better single core performance? I could imagine that the latter already exists, just not in soc with >16 cores. My naive view is that…
I don't think youtube playback is a relevant comparison since it uses ~0 CPU. Pretty much all phones have hardware accelerated decoding. Lots of TVs and streaming devices use an ancient Android phone SoC yet they too can play YT and run a browser. The entire UI is often a local web app.
Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment
#24I wonder if a source-based distro like Gentoo would have made OP's life slightly easier. Portage for instance should allow you to maintain a set of patches to automatically apply when you update your kernel. Those flatpak problems also shouldn't exist there.
Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just setup Gentoo on a Lenovo laptop last week. It was the least painful process for a Linux laptop of my entire career. Everything just works. Even sleep and the fingerprint sensor for sudo. LLM tuis replaced Google entirely. I can't even say there was any pain whatsoever. The experience is now more akin to MacOS circa 10.6.x years.
Was it a Snapdragon laptop? Because if it wasn't, then it has nothing to do with the OPs question.
Driver support for that particular Lenovo is 100%. You just recompile. The issue is more to do with the CPU not being as good as say an AMD AI Max or an M4.
Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment
#26Fascinating! I've been running the laptop version-ish of this experiment with the 14M9610, and my major complaint is Device Tree sucks. It's been explained to me why all of ARM can't just enumerate devices like PCs do, but it still sucks. This means every ARM device starts off in custom kernel territory, which makes all sorts of hacks okay to begin with, since you need a custom kernel anyway.
ACPI does exist for Aarch64, but is only really used for Windows client devices, and server hardware - though I think the Ampere hardware in the article would use ACPI not DT.
If you want to run Linux on one of the modern Qualcomm Windows laptops, you still generally end up needing to use device tree.
Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment
#27I'm not surprised at the outcome. These Ampere system single core/thread performance is pretty low and that is where you feel it. The OS/software simply cannot allocate the threads across enough cores effectively to make up for this difference. This is why things like the Apple M Series feels so fast, because while they don't win the multi core performance especially when going up against a 80 core beast like this, t…
Apple M series is also aarch64 architecture, isn't it? Could you explain more why you expect Ampere to be slow but M series to be fast?
Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment
#28Can the ThinkPad T14 ARM Snapdragon variant function without pain as a daily Linux/BSD driver?
When I looked at this before I found https://github.com/kuruczgy/x1e-nixos-config - reasonable though not 100% support.
I believe Ubuntu also has semi official X1 elite support, no idea if they're working on the latest generation.
Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment
#29I don't understand the kernel problem. Why did he feel he had to rebuild the kernel weekly? When the amdgpu stopped working why couldn't he just go back to the last working kernel?
I presumed that as a kernel developer, he would run the kernel he runs, which would require rebuilding periodically. Daily doesn't make sense, monthly is too infrequent given the rate of change in the kernel.
My speculation though. When I was building an app I was using, I used to run a recent stable build on my device instead of just the one released in the Play Store. Simplifies having to keep multiple devices.
Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment
#30I wonder if a source-based distro like Gentoo would have made OP's life slightly easier. Portage for instance should allow you to maintain a set of patches to automatically apply when you update your kernel. Those flatpak problems also shouldn't exist there.
At very least it would have given all those cores something to do :-)