Many Intel Bay Trail Devices Have Been Borked On Linux For The Past Year

[kaidenshi]

I had this happen on the AsRock N3700-ITX (Braswell/CherryView) motherboard. It's a great little board for the price if you're only interested in Windows 10, but no combination of Linux kernel and Intel driver would prevent severe graphic glitches (font rendering, random repaint issues, broken vsync) and it would eventually freeze/panic. This was consistent across several distros including Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Antergos and tested with the most current Linux kernel and Intel video driver as of October 2015. That's when I gave up on it and sold it to a friend who needed a Win10 based media center PC.

[Luke]

It would seem to me that if you have one of these clunker laptops as a secondary machine, don't have/cannot get an ebay account(phone verification etc), and have absolutely no use for Windows one option would be to boot with nomodeset, disable the Intel driver entirely, and run it on framebuffer only they way you would an old Pentium II/III/early IV laptop. No video acceleration at all, but able to run XFCE, LXDE or best of all MATE at some non-zero desktop resolution and access your emails without a smartphone, without Microsoft, and without money for a new machine. If someone was throwing one away I would take it, my "brick" standard being machines with bootloaders locked to forcilby prevent a non-original OEM from booting at all. To buy it it would have to be damned cheap, like my Pentium II laptop was in 2009 ($10 for that). For $10 I didn't care one bit that it could not run compiz.

If you need a netbook, get a first generation one or a PIne Trail (2nd generation) netbook used. If you need more power or need to buy randomly with cash off the shelf, get an AMD fusion machine or a Chromebook and install Linux on that. Chromebooks all support installing vanilla coreboot and real Linux over it because Google uses a hacked Coreboot with a partial Linux install over it in the first place. Anthing that can't handle Linux enough to run a browser can't be sold as a Chromebook without generating buckets of customer returns. Reject all new Windows hardware that comes from Intel unless you have prior proof the device will work for your purposes.

[drSeehas]

... Too bad AMD does not have a viable CPU right now in the mobile space.

???
Why is Carrizo not a viable CPU?

[Kano]

Bay Trail is absolutely low cost, in that range you would find AMD E1/E2 but not Carrizo.

[drSeehas]

Bay Trail is absolutely low cost, in that range you would find AMD E1/E2 but not Carrizo.

So why is Carrizo-L (low cost) not a viable CPU?

[cb88]

So why is Carrizo-L (low cost) not a viable CPU?

Indeed... I got a couple Lenovo x131e laptops with E2-1800 in them... very decent netbooks (upgradable to 8GB ram) with decent graphics even on the open source drivers.

[drSeehas]

... laptops with E2-1800 in them...

E2-1800 is old dual core Bobcat not (quad core) Carrizo-L.

[speculatrix]

I've got a convertible tablet with a Baytrail Z3735F SoC.
I've just about got it running linux, with a lot of help from others. You need to build a kernel with out of tree patches, particularly if you want the SDIO Realtek Wifi card to work.

What works: boots, display, touch screen, microSD card slot in tablet, keyboard & touchpad and SDHC in dock. WiFi is OK.

Sounds OK so far?

What doesn't work: sound (problem with baytrail SoC supporting chipset), bluetooth, cameras, ACPI power, screen brightness, sleep/resume and other things.

And it's not that stable. I am hoping the cstates hack will make it useable.

[speculatrix]

I bought mine TWO Christmases ago... just crashed AGAIN with kernel 4.4 so definitely still not fixed. Thing that ticks me off is they advertised it as a Pentium not an Atom.

Intel using "Pentium" and "Celeron" interchangeably with Atom etc.. confusing as anything.

[yacc143]

Kernel, Mesa, X version?

I've got a haswell i7 quad (mobile thinkpad t440p) with two external 1080p displays that is actually quite stable, as long as I leave it in the dock.... My only issues are when I dock/undock while the laptop is suspended (when it wakes up, things just hang).

I'm currently running Ubuntu 15.10 (X 1.17), Mesa from git, and kernel 4.5.0rc1. Note that kernel 4.4 was incredibly unstable for me, and 4.3 may have been as well. I believe that 4.2 was ok, but I haven't ran it in a while (even though its the default for my distro).

Linux asterix 3.16.0-62-generic #83~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri Feb 26 22:52:39 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

ii xorg 1:7.7+1ubuntu amd64 X.Org X Window System
ii libgl1-mesa-dri: 10.1.3-0ubunt amd64 free implementation of the OpenGL API

Basically Ubuntu 14.04

Currently I'm trying max C1, which seems to have stabilized X11, but at the same time, my i7 never goes below 78°C, which is literally uncool, when used plugged in, and I don't want to know what it would do to battery run times.