Linux 4.18 Is Appearing To Cause Problems For Those Running Older CPUs

[L_A_G]

Stop spreading FUD. Meltdown does not affect non-intel cpus AT ALL, not even theoretically. Meltdown mitigation has the largest performance penalty and is intel-specific. As for the spectre variants, only variant 1 is inherent in all cpu architectures. And hillariously, it is the less costly to mitigate... Other spectre variants affect amd cpus only in theory. In practice, it is almost impossible to affect an amd architecture with let's say spectre v2, and no such attack has been demonstrated until today.

Meltdown specifically may not be known to affect AMD CPUs, but other than Intel CPUs it is known to affect some ARM-based CPUs, IBM POWER! 8 and 9 along with older SPARC-based CPUs.

Your information is clearly based on the initial disclosures as you seem to be completely unaware of any of the developments that have happened since then, both in terms of what's vulnerable to what and new vulnerabilities like the ones exploiting speculative store and the TLB.

[starshipeleven]

WAT O_o

Price varies depending on availability I guess. In some places you can't find AMD at all and you have to buy online and pay shipping and/or customs and other tax on top.

[andreano]

Wtf, that's the CPU with the broken HPET timer! Is that supposed to work now?

My mobile Core 2 Duo (45nm) started hanging randomly when tickless kernels were introduced (CONFIG_NOHZ). That must have been in 2011 or so, and that bug was never solved.

You could hang the whole system very easily by running any short-sleeping task, such as listening to music. It would hang indefinitely until you gave it physical input (mouse, keyboard, lid, AC, whatever). Very funny bug.

[brrrrttttt]

It probably has to do with spectre/meltdown mitigations, perhaps. I always have purchased AMD CPUs, even though they are more expensive, i've always had a beter feeling about them as if it is a more solidly engineered product. And my intuitions were correct. Its paid off as AMD don't need all of the performance hindering mitigations that Intel CPUs need. Intel was cutting corners on security to get that little bit of extra performance edge to brag about, basically, they were cheating. AMD was playing it safe and responsibly.

I don't really buy that narrative. Intel were just ahead of AMD with speculative features, so when somebody discovered how to exploit it, AMD didn't get bitten as hard.

[linner]

I'm still running a Q9550 system and it's on kernel 4.18.5 without problems... Eh?

BTW, that machine it still quite usable. It was my primary workstation and gaming machine until a few months ago. Now it's in my arcade machine.

[DavidKL]

It took me a quite a few 32-bit distros to find one that would run, without tweaks, on an ancient Shuttle with an Athlon XP and a VIA board. That was a number of years ago. I think only Xubuntu (or Lubuntu... don't remember) worked, of the various Ubuntu distros. I know it was only one of the Ubuntu flavors. I also tried a number of other distros. It was interesting to find one flavor of Ubuntu working without problems while the rest, including several other distros, would not.

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

It took me a quite a few 32-bit distros to find one that would run, without tweaks, on an ancient Shuttle with an Athlon XP and a VIA board. That was a number of years ago. I think only Xubuntu (or Lubuntu... don't remember) worked, of the various Ubuntu distros. I know it was only one of the Ubuntu flavors. I also tried a number of other distros. It was interesting to find one flavor of Ubuntu working without problems while the rest, including several other distros, would not.

That doesn't make sense: The kernel as well as the graphic stack is the same in all flavours.

[brrrrttttt]

That doesn't make sense: The kernel as well as the graphic stack is the same in all flavours.

Agree. The only thing that I've come across commonly with old hardware is PAE. In the case of Athlon XP, it came many years after Pentium Pro so I expect it has PAE.

[rene]

I enjoy your videos. Quick offtopic question: That's one heck of a great video quality, what camera do you use to record them?

Thanks! I currently mostly use a Lumix G70, w/ external microphone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j6POi1GYLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3YGe1YHiZ0

[waxhead]

How much RAM do you have?

On my main system (core 2 duo E6600) I have 4GB which is plenty especially when I enable zswap.