Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linux 4.7 Released

lkml.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 79 posts

Re: Linux 4.7 Released

#21

Post by Ruphin »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #16

I see there's support for the new Radeon RX480. I've been thinking about picking up a Radeon card. Can anyone speak to their experience of Radeon support on Linux and whether or not you think it's a good idea?

From my experience using AMD cards, the linux drivers have some serious issues, to the point where on-board intel graphics would give me much more stability. With AMD cards I would get excessive screen tearing just from dragging or resizing windows in a desktop environment. The advantage of AMD is that their open source drivers are acceptable, where nvidia's open source drivers are not great.

In terms of stability, the proprietary nvidia drivers are simply the best, and gave me significantly less issues. For my daily workstation I even ended up replacing my (expensive) AMD card for an nvidia one because the desktop environment felt like it was running less than 10 fps, and it triggered me to no end.

Even if AMD gets equal or even better performance than nvidia in gaming environments, I am not willing to compromise the desktop for that.

If you don't mind using the closed-souce nvidia driver, I strongly suggest nvidia.

Re: Linux 4.7 Released

#22

Post by Zagitta »

dman wrote: post #15
dopeboy wrote: post #14

Could anyone comment on the state of power management in Linux? Are we up to par with OSX and Windows yet?

Depends on the hardware and the amount of effort you put in. If you stick to purely Intel chips (cpu, gpu and wifi) if you spend the 5 minutes it takes to get powertop happy then you end up with equivalent battery life to windows. (Basing this on thinkpad t440 and thinkpad t450). On my AMD APU laptop, I have been unable to get battery life to be similar to windows.

Sadly this isn't quite the case with skylake IGPU, there's a ton of issues with power management options rendering the system very unstable or down right unusable.

Also worth noting is that NVME ssd power management is flat out unsupported resulting in additional 3W power draw on DELL XPS 13 pcs out of the 6W that's currently possible with stable power options enabled.

Re: Linux 4.7 Released

#23

Post by voltagex_ »

Zagitta wrote: post #22
dman wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the hardware and the amount of effort you put in. If you stick to purely Intel chips (cpu, gpu and wifi) if you spend the 5 minutes it takes to get powertop happy then you end up with equivalent battery life to windows. (Basing this on thinkpad t440 and thinkpad t450). On my AMD APU laptop, I have been unable to get battery life to be similar to windows.

Sadly this isn't quite the case with skylake IGPU, there's a ton of issues with power management options rendering the system very unstable or down right unusable. Also worth noting is that NVME ssd power management is flat out unsupported resulting in additional 3W power draw on DELL XPS 13 pcs out of the 6W that's currently possible with stable power options enabled.

Thanks. Any mailing list threads / bugs I should follow for this? I haven't checked the state of Linux on the XPS 9350 since mjg59 posted that thing about everything being broken.

Re: Linux 4.7 Released

#24

Post by zbraniecki »

Zagitta wrote: post #22
dman wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the hardware and the amount of effort you put in. If you stick to purely Intel chips (cpu, gpu and wifi) if you spend the 5 minutes it takes to get powertop happy then you end up with equivalent battery life to windows. (Basing this on thinkpad t440 and thinkpad t450). On my AMD APU laptop, I have been unable to get battery life to be similar to windows.

Sadly this isn't quite the case with skylake IGPU, there's a ton of issues with power management options rendering the system very unstable or down right unusable. Also worth noting is that NVME ssd power management is flat out unsupported resulting in additional 3W power draw on DELL XPS 13 pcs out of the 6W that's currently possible with stable power options enabled.

Just to put those words in context - I use Dell XPS 13 with Linux 4.7 and my power usage drops to 4.1 Watt discharge rate and holds an average of 6 W when I'm on average use.

That means that I usually have around 7-8 hours of battery on my average use, and if I'm in a battery-sensitive environment like a long flight, I can reduce screen brightness and turn off wifi and get up to 14 hours of battery.

Right at this moment I have Fx with 2 windows, 10 tabs each, half-brightness, wifi on, and I'm at 5.78 W, 87% battery with 9h 28m left estimated.

I believe Windows may have even better, and I see my NVMe not dropping to the lowest power saving state, but it's not that bad IMO :)

Re: Linux 4.7 Released

#25

Post by epberry »

dominotw wrote: post #5

>CPU accounting controller: Split cpuacct.usage into user usage and sys usage commit Has anyone used this to calculate how many containers can be packed onto a machine based on historical usage data?

That's a pretty interesting idea... I suppose you would make a guess at first to allocate containers and then adjust over time automatically? But in a monitored environment you're already going to know those stats so actually I'm not sure how this helps.

Re: Linux 4.7 Released

#26

Post by voltagex_ »

Honest question: how many years do you think it'll be until embedded device manufacturers (routers, various TV boxes, wifi hard drives [1]) ship recent kernels? A $200 modem/router bought 6 months ago ships with a hacked up version of 2.6.36.4 that's barely buildable - mainly because the wifi chipset vendor refuses to open source their code and refuses to update the BSP [2].

1: http://www.seagate.com/au/en/support/downloads/item/wireless...

2: http://www.tp-link.com.au/gpl-code.html?model=Archer%20D9

Re: Linux 4.7 Released

#29

Post by grawlinson »

voltagex_ wrote: post #26

Honest question: how many years do you think it'll be until embedded device manufacturers (routers, various TV boxes, wifi hard drives [1]) ship recent kernels? A $200 modem/router bought 6 months ago ships with a hacked up version of 2.6.36.4 that's barely buildable - mainly because the wifi chipset vendor refuses to open source their code and refuses to update the BSP [2]. 1: http://www.seagate.com/au/en/support/do…

>mainly because the wifi chipset vendor refuses to open source their code and refuses to update the BSP

In that case, never. Trying to get vendors to open source anything is a hilarious exercise in futility.

Re: Linux 4.7 Released

#30

Post by pmorici »

voltagex_ wrote: post #26

Honest question: how many years do you think it'll be until embedded device manufacturers (routers, various TV boxes, wifi hard drives [1]) ship recent kernels? A $200 modem/router bought 6 months ago ships with a hacked up version of 2.6.36.4 that's barely buildable - mainly because the wifi chipset vendor refuses to open source their code and refuses to update the BSP [2]. 1: http://www.seagate.com/au/en/support/do…

You have to look at it from their perspective. Why spend money updating something that works? The number of people who care that their device firmware uses a recent Linux kernel version is so infinitesimally small satisfying them wouldn't even move the needle on sales and you apparently bought one any ways so why should they care?

If you want hardware you can tinker with build your own from parts you know work with recent kernels or buy a product specifically marketed at that segment.

Post reply on HN