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Nvme thermal throttling
by Russell Reiter 03 Jun '19

03 Jun '19

I'd posted information regarding M.2 Nvme heating and file transfer times on another thread and I have since installed this heat-sink. It has made enough of a difference that I thought I'd update. https://www.newegg.ca/p/35Y-005D-00007?Item=9SIADDZ6YW3437 While the sales blah said it is mandatory to use the supplied thermal pads, it came with three pads layered in plastic backing and no instructions. I used the two thinner pink ones and didn't realize at the time that the thicker blue one came apart as little blue squares. On reflection it looks like these were intended for padding the backing-plane around the chips because the sales picture show's a blue pad protruding from the end of the enclosure but I'd have to remove it from the slot again to reapply those pads. It was trickier to install this go around with my slightly arthritic fingers and all that bulk around it so I'm waiting on that. This copy from a 512GiB WD Black Nvme in a USB-C enclosure was done using pipe viewer in the console as opposed to the Nautilus file widget. So in comparing apples to oranges ymmv but the previous Nautilus copy from my installed SSD which was formatted to ext4 took almost 15 minutes, slowing to 95MiB/s about two thirds of the way through the copy. This copy from a NTFS file system on Nvme in an external enclosure via USB-C happened in 4min and hardly wavered from 500MiB/s. [R3eiter@archon ~]$ pv /run/media/R3eiter/..path to 512GiB USB-C../backup.tar.gz > /run/media/R3eiter/..path to 1TB Nvme../backup.tar.gz 118GiB 0:03:56 [ 512MiB/s] [================================>] 100% However copying from one place to another on the 1TB Nvme seems to have crunched it's on-board cache. In the last minute of this copy, speed dropped from around 500MiB/s to 25MiB/s with an occasional leap up to 475MiB/s. [R3eiter@archon ~]$ pv /run/media/R3eiter/DATA/Nvme/bak/backup.tar.gz > /run/media/R3eiter/DATA/Nvme/backup.tar.gz 118GiB 0:06:35 [ 307MiB/s] [================================>] 100% Booting from Nvme sure is is quick. I took Hugh's advice and masked PolicyKit in order to deal with a very slow shutdown watchdog on rebooting. I also masked Plymouth, this shaved the total boot time down a bit more than a second. Around ten seconds on the SSD and 7 seconds on the Nvme. F30 seems to have glossed over the grub boot screen while the Plymouth graphics widget was chewing up almost 3 seconds. I only left PolicyKit active long enough to install a proprietary Nvidia driver which is now available from the software apps repo for F30. I did this because F30 now defaults to Wayland which doesn't play well with Nvidia cards. Hopefully this will change. I used the F30 software install app to do this Nvidia update because I had a very odd experience with the gui for the bios setup. After my last firmware update I had to enable VT-d in bios from the keyboard without the mouse plugged in order to stop the output freezing. There was also a problem with cold booting the OS (when I upgraded F27 to 28 and then 29) while a tv was plugged into the Nvidia card via hdmi and a monitor on display port. Not being able to decide which output of the Nvidia card to recognize, the system woke neither. Heres what my current Fedora 30 startup info shows. [R3eiter@archon ~]$ sudo systemd-analyze Startup finished in 1.257s (kernel) + 1.413s (initrd) + 4.429s (userspace) = 7.101s graphical.target reached after 4.421s in userspace [R3eiter@archon ~]$ sudo systemd-analyze blame 2.484s systemd-udev-settle.service 609ms dracut-initqueue.service 573ms initrd-switch-root.service 569ms lvm2-monitor.service 527ms systemd-logind.service 412ms firewalld.service 360ms akmods.service 302ms udisks2.service 296ms libvirtd.service 251ms systemd-resolved.service 224ms systemd-machined.service 205ms lvm2-pvscan@259:2.service 198ms sssd.service 187ms systemd-udevd.service 173ms systemd-journal-flush.service 148ms systemd-journald.service 129ms dracut-pre-pivot.service 127ms user(a)42.service 108ms ModemManager.service 106ms upower.service 96ms avahi-daemon.service 94ms user(a)1000.service 85ms bluetooth.service This post is obviously more seat of the pants than science, but there are very few situations where a user can see with the naked eye that performance was sub-optimal. This was one of them.

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SSH Host tab completion
by Daniel Wayne Armstrong 03 Jun '19

03 Jun '19

Hello all ... I am currently running Debian Buster and Bash shell. I have a few Host aliases defined in my ~/.ssh/config. Example: Host test-server. So when, in console, I type ... $ ssh tes ... and hit Tab, then auto-completion fills out ... $ ssh test-server When I try to do the same thing in a terminal (urxvt), tab completion does *not* work. The complete host alias has to be entered. *But* tab completion for ssh host aliases *does* work if entered within tmux running in the terminal. Any idea how I can get tab completion working for ssh host aliases in the terminal? -- Daniel Wayne Armstrong https://www.circuidipity.com <http://www.circuidipity.com> Accomplish the great task by a series of small acts. -- Lao Tzu

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vim on Git
by 90ur1 90ur1 30 May '19

30 May '19

Couldn't stop from sharing a screenshot of this , while installing Git on Windows : "...for historical reasons ..modern GUI.. " Gouri [image: Capture.PNG]

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Intel Bay Trail bug fixed in 5.3!
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 28 May '19

28 May '19

Bay Trail is a family of processors/SoCs introduced in 2013. They were ubiquitous. And they suffered hangs under Linux. <https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/codename/55844/bay-tra…> The work-around has been to turn off some power-saving capabilities, crippling the usefulness of these "low-power" chips. (I suspect most users never found the magic incantation to do this and so have just given up on running Linux on these systems.) I'm subscribed to the bugzilla entries. I just got a notification of the thousandth comment added to one. A kernel patch has been submitted by Intel and accepted for 5.3 (months away). The whole useful life of this SoC has been impaired. This patch is work-around code for a chip bug. The patch itself is restricted to "Valleyview" which is a name for something that covers all Bay Trail chips, and only Bay Trail chips. <https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109051> --- Comment #1000 from w2q(a)arcor.de --- I may cite Hans de Goede from this site: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/mobile-linux/1096936-intel-b… " Actually the Intel open-source devs have been working on fixing this and a patch-series which should improve things wrt this has been queued for merging into 5.3 (it just missed the 5.2 merge window), see: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/drm-intel/commit/?id=a75d035fedbdecf83f86767aa… " Yeah, comment 1000!

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Ryzen 3 Specs for Chipset and other details
by nick 27 May '19

27 May '19

Greetings, I'm sure some of you already know but ryzen 3 was announced today. I don't know all the details but the most interesting things are: * Native PCI Express 4 and USB 3.1 on the chipset not sure about GEN 2 * 64 Core Data Center Processors with hyper threading I'm assuming so 128 threads * Not been tested externally but IPC per core similar to Intel This is a link to the discussion on motherboards: https://hothardware.com/news/amd-x570-ryzen-3000-zen-2-motherboard-roundup Seems to be a interesting product stack, Nick

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the meaning of Core i[3579] (was: NUC NUC NUC)
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 27 May '19

27 May '19

TL;DR: Intel uses brands. We care about technology. Sometimes brands map cleanly onto technology, but sometimes they don't. You cannot trust that mapping. | From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> | Yeah the i7 is becoming very inconsistent in gen 9. A few high end | ones have kept SMT, while the lower end ones don't have it, but the core | count has gone up instead. I believe all i9 chips have SMT. Here's my inference on the matter (not based on careful research): - these names are brands, not technology - we (techies) want them to represent technologies. For example, we kind of know what "Core i5" means - when times are good, and changes are smooth, intel tries to align its brands with technologies - when Intel is desperate, they muddy the waters of their brands Example trajectory: - Pentium meant one thing. - Then it got extended with the II and III branding AND technologies. Still related, and the branding evolved in a coherent way - Then the Pentium 4 came along and it was something completely different - Pentium M was also technically different, but that was signified by a sufficiently different name (in my perception) - "Pentium" lay dormant for a bit, and then got attached to some Atom-architecture and low-end (crippled) Core chips. Talk about confusing! It became a pricing / value designator and not a technology. Intel is in trouble. It's latest fab processes (10 nanometer) are not coming on stream as quickly as they had planned and promised. Historically they have been significantly ahead of other fabs. Now they are behind and squirming visibly. This has thrown their whole roadmap off. The i9 seems to be a way of showing forward motion without needing the new fab processes. A way to appear to "refresh" their line without stressing their manufacturing capabilities. As far as I recall, they do have one 10nm product that they claim is shipping but it's not very good and so probably nobody is buying it. It is probably so expensive to produce (low yields) that they don't want anyone to buy it. It's a mobile chip without a GPU (probably due to yield issues) that isn't notably better than the normal 14nm versions that are shipping. Since 10nm isn't productive, they are shipping as much 14nm product as they can make. But it's not enough for the market. They didn't build up 14nm capacity because they thought they would be using 10nm fabs. Intel also has AMD as a competitor and threat for CPUs, something they could ignore for a long time. The upcoming "Rome" AMD server chip looks to be particularly scary. AMD is selectively using TSMC's 7nm technology (apparently comparable to Intel's 10nm -- don't get fooled by the number). In the eighth generation of Core, they moved some extra cores and HT down to lower-numbered models, probably to ward off the mild AMD threats. Perhaps to stimulate consumer excitement. In my mind, this happens to make the i5 a "sweet spot". And make the 8th gen fairly attractive (up until now, I've been content sitting at the 4th gen). But maybe the next one will better deal with the speculation problems. Don't count Intel out. Their server chips were inferior to AMD's Opterons for a long period but the server market didn't significantly switch to AMD. Then Intel technology caught up and surpassed AMD. ================ The term "microarchitecure" is used to describe how a chip is organized. The Core "microarchitecture" started with the Core 2 Duo branding. The "Core" branding before that had a different microarchitecture (32-bit). So confusing. Intel's current Core-brand processors (and XEON-brand too) are still based on an evolved Core microarchitecture. AMD's Zen microarchitecture is newish, and it is what has put them back into the game. When I talk about "Atom", I'm refering to microarchitecture. The branding of those products is way too hard to follow.

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Ontario Bill 72: "Right to Repair"
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 25 May '19

25 May '19

This is a private member's bill so it is unlikely to pass. <https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/what-on-earth-newsletter-right-to-repair…> <https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-42/session-1/b…>

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NUC NUC NUC
by Evan Leibovitch 22 May '19

22 May '19

Hi all, I'm looking to upgrade my PC that's served me well for about 8 years, but it's starting to be unreliable and I can't upgrade the RAM beyond 4GB. So I'm looking at a new desktop system that will be used mainly for many-tabs-open browsing and multimedia editing using openshot, audacity, etc. Of course must run Linux well. I am currently looking at two NUC-form-factor barebones systems that use the 8th gen Intel i7, an Intel model available through CC <https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=570_7_1203_1157&item…> and a Zotac model available from Amazon <https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B079H24SWZ/>. Both are about the same price. I would be installing 16GB RAM, an SSD and two screens. Can anyone offer any advice whether to go with one, the other, or neither? Are there better places to buy? Thanks for all suggestions. -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch or @el56

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Google suspends some business with Huawei
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 21 May '19

21 May '19

<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-huawei-tech-alphabet-exclusive/exclusive…> This looks like it will affect Huawei Android phones. It looks like Google is being forced by the US Federal government. Google better move out of the US. To be honest, this looks like something so stupid that it's going to be changed.

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Q4OS anyone?
by Ken Heard 17 May '19

17 May '19

Hi, I am thinking of using the Q4OS operating system instead of Debian because Q4OS is one of two distributions which includes the Trinity DE which I have been using for some time with Debian. I would appreciate comments from anyone here who uses or has some knowledge of this OS. Regards, Ken

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