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

[phoronix]

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

As a P.S.A. for those tending to quickly upgrade to new major kernel releases but are doing so on older hardware, there appears to be a show-stopping bug that made it into the stable Linux 4.18 series...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.18-Old-CPU-Issue

[waxhead]

"if you are running on a system as old as the Core 2 Duo days (2006~2010)" ... I still run it ... Core 2 DUO E6600 and have no issues with bad performance Besides this CPU is without that pesky management engine as well so in many ways it is much better than a newer CPU (the way I see it).

[Azrael5]

Excellent news. Regression is the aim.

[latalante]

I also did not notice any problems with Intel Core 2 - T5300 (2006) on 4.18.x and 4.19-rc1 kernels. I use ArchLinux.

[eydee]

There isn't really such thing as a Core 2 era. It's Athlon 64 era. Intel deserves no free advertisement.

[brrrrttttt]

There isn't really such thing as a Core 2 era. It's Athlon 64 era. Intel deserves no free advertisement.

No, Conroe C2D is where the crown shifted from Athlon64 to Intel. e.g. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...n-64,1282.html

[phoronix38]

I have a 2.8GHz Core2Quad from 2008 with a higher end GPU from about that time and that computer is still great to use as long as I don't encode HEVC/VP9. It is more sluggish though if I use Windows. Hopefully the computer will survive two more years and really give me a lot for the money.

[Serafean]

I have a 2.8GHz Core2Quad from 2008 with a higher end GPU from about that time and that computer is still great to use as long as I don't encode HEVC/VP9. It is more sluggish though if I use Windows. Hopefully the computer will survive two more years and really give me a lot for the money.

Same here, I'll just upgrade the GPU to get HEVC/AV1 decoding, and carry on...

[Beherit]

I've not had this problem with my Q9550 CPU using the 4.18.x kernels.

Is it perhaps because I use clochsource=tsc as kernel parm at boot?

[jpg44]

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.