Xeon Skylake Users May Run Into Display Problems With Current Distributions

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Xeon Skylake Users May Run Into Display Problems With Current Distributions

If you are building a new system around an Intel Xeon Skylake processor that features integrated graphics, you may have some out-of-the-box issues with current stable Linux distributions...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=WKS-GT2-No-Modeset

[GreatEmerald]

I wonder how many people are building Skylake Xeon systems and expect to use the GUI

[Michael]

I wonder how many people are building Skylake Xeon systems and expect to use the GUI

Workstations?

[Timeus]

I just bought Dell XPS 8900 with i7 6700. I need to disable acpi to boot Ubuntu 15.10 usb drive. Hope Ubuntu 16.04 could fix this problem. I'm waiting for NVIDIA Pascal GPU next year. I will decide what to buy after Michael's GPU benchmarks on Linux systems.

[GreatEmerald]

Workstations?

I'd expect workstations to use something like Quadro/FirePro if they're graphics workstations. If they're just regular work PCs, then they won't be using Xeon. And whether you could say that people "build" workstations is debatable; of them, I doubt many read Phoronix.

Not to say that the article isn't worthwhile, mind you. It just makes it sound like it's the most common thing in the world to have Xeon based PCs

[pollux_9t]

Workstations?

Or home servers.
I think this might be related to an issue I had with openSUSE and a Haswell Xeon. My screen wouldn't come up after it went to sleep. According to Takashi Iwai from SUSE this was a regression present since 3.17 where the display encoder would always send a DisplayPort encoded signal even when the monitor is i.e. DVI like in my case.
He fixed it so you might try OpenSUSE 42.1 with all updates installed. Cheers and good luck! (and the fixes were upstreamed so I guess this is why 4.4 works )

https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=955190

[wizard69]

I wonder how many people are building Skylake Xeon systems and expect to use the GUI

I would imagine everyone buying the setup would expect to use the GPU, otherwise they have other XEON chips to choose from. In any event I suspect that you are expressing an attitude here that isn't always inline with reality, that is servers chips don't need GPU's. Maybe not but I've seen this expressed before and frankly it indicates a very narrow view of what people can expect out of workstation or server based systems. Not everybody has a database running on their box and not every workstation needs an advance graphics processor. Further Intels GPUs have come a long ways and actually do fairly well as OpenCL accelerators for certain code bases.

Eventually Intel will get to the point of having HSA like hardware capabilities similar to what AMD is pursuing. We might not be completely there yet but the reality is integrated GPU's are already finding considerable use by software vendors to enhance the compute capabilities of their software. Sometimes the integrated GPU works better for compute, than the alternative of going off chip to a discrete GPU. As a work station you can't dismiss integrated GPUs anymore as useless. Even in a server environment a GPU can be harnessed if the workload is amendable.

[FireWalkerX]

My system with a mobile skylake i7 (6700) needed nomodeset to display a desktop, tried several distros

[GreatEmerald]

I would imagine everyone buying the setup would expect to use the GPU, otherwise they have other XEON chips to choose from. In any event I suspect that you are expressing an attitude here that isn't always inline with reality, that is servers chips don't need GPU's. Maybe not but I've seen this expressed before and frankly it indicates a very narrow view of what people can expect out of workstation or server based systems. Not everybody has a database running on their box and not every workstation needs an advance graphics processor. Further Intels GPUs have come a long ways and actually do fairly well as OpenCL accelerators for certain code bases.

Nope, that's not what I'm saying. I expect a small number as the answer to my question, not 0.

As for OpenCL acceleration, of course, but that's not a GUI.

[ferry]

Even Windows 2000 servers had a GUI, and these days I would say you would expect to run KDE or Gnome smoothly on your server. But hey, if you're such a CLI jockey go ahead and vi your way through the conf files on your headless server. Good for you!