I have an AMD APU A8-7600 and my linux machine sux?

[aht0]

edit.: before i get into work again.. one thing thats funny here, when running any of these distros from usb stick (live) i have the feeling that the os run better than when i install on hdd..

HDD issue, sure as hell. Since USB stick (ok, USB3 sticks are slightly faster) tends to be bunch of times slower than HDD and situation should be normally in reverse.

What does the hard drive SMART info say? If you happen to have something like bunch Interface CRC Errors, it would mean faulty SATA cable (example). Another thing to watch out for is Reallocated Sector Count. Anything other than 0 on this attribute, better start thinking how to find new replacement for the disk.
Increased spin-up times and so forth may indicate mechanical issues, latter needs testing though to be sure of but it may be a problem even if SMART info is otherwise okay.

Unless you seriously need terabyte-sized space, drop the mech drive, even if it tests out and go for SSD. Way smoother experience.

[yro84]

funny that you guys just ignore that i said this same machine runs great on windows... how could it be hdd?

anyway.. i just did another tryout at home. i formated the partition used for linux and installed ubuntu 16.04 latest on it. added the official ppa for latest mesa and upgraded it to mesa 17.0.2.

did some tweaks here and there and im almost there with this ubuntu setup. all running much better than ever. some behaviours i dont like but i think are related to "configurations" only. as an example: i feel that the mouse runs much faster than i would it like to be but ill just dig into it to see how to configure it as my taste.

anyway, i think that its all about the mesa and kernel drivers to have a better experience out of the box, but its not there yet.

the experience so far is almost great, but not there yet. maybe with mesa 17.3.xx and kernel 4.12.. lets see what happens with amd efforts from now on..

[duby229]

funny that you guys just ignore that i said this same machine runs great on windows... how could it be hdd?

anyway.. i just did another tryout at home. i formated the partition used for linux and installed ubuntu 16.04 latest on it. added the official ppa for latest mesa and upgraded it to mesa 17.0.2.

did some tweaks here and there and im almost there with this ubuntu setup. all running much better than ever. some behaviours i dont like but i think are related to "configurations" only. as an example: i feel that the mouse runs much faster than i would it like to be but ill just dig into it to see how to configure it as my taste.

anyway, i think that its all about the mesa and kernel drivers to have a better experience out of the box, but its not there yet.

the experience so far is almost great, but not there yet. maybe with mesa 17.3.xx and kernel 4.12.. lets see what happens with amd efforts from now on..

Because Windows and Linux do paging very differently. Windows pages and swaps out to disk and becomes very sensitive to disk bandwidth. Linux avoids swapping pages to disk like it was a plague and only does so after running out of memory. It still seems to me like you are experiencing disk latency problems. Linux essentially tries to read from disk once only and as such its paging mechanism was optimized to run entirely from RAM. So that one time you need to read from disk it is very sensitive to the latency it takes to do so.

I would still check to see if the SATA controller is is configured in the BIOS for IDE mode or AHCI mode, and I would very seriously consider upgrading to a SSD.

Just think about it like this, a HDD has access latencies of right around 60ms. That is right at the cusp of what humans can notice and is more or less what you described.

[yro84]

SSD is out of question as in Brazil the price is not worth the product.

So if its related to the latency, how can you explain things running much better now? on the same hardware? o.O Strange..

As I said, its almost there. This setup is almost there, almost great.

One thing to note here is that this hardware was builded about 8 months or so. The HDD is "new" for this time of use and is responding great on any scenario. Tested with PCCheck and with disk test from Hirens BootCD and all fine. No problems what so ever.

This alone can put the HDD latency problem for the side of the window... Now I need to tweak the mouse thing (maybe the mouse sensitive) and adjust the screen corners thing (that one that makes the windows be hovered to the corners).. dont know if im writing right..

[yro84]

oh.. can you point out how can i test the hdd latency to see if there are some kind of wreid thing going on? o.O

[duby229]

Well there is a graphical utility called gsmartcontrol that can give you statistics on your drive. If the drive has a physical defect it can tell you about it., but that's not likely to be a problem. It's just simply that spinning harddrives have a high latency and Linux doesn't deal with it very well. As for why you are noticing a difference between installations, it could be a number of things including differences in the installed packages, which in turn could mean differences in what is loaded in memory.

[Menard]

Hi I face exactly the same problem as in this thread.

- A8 7600 AMD APU
- Mint 64 bits Tessa
- worked well in demo from 3.0 usb stick
- works bad from SATA HD all perfect though (Smart etc) bios set in Legacy mode and HD in Sata mode (not AHCI)
- on the same machine but on another HD XP 32 bits performs far better except in video and HD

but I got more information !!

I had a look on hardware informations, and I notice CPU works limited to 3100 MHz as in XP it works from 3100 Mhz to 3750 MHz ... much different
The system is set by default on "Ondemand" concerning the CPU management and if I set it on "Performance" after the reboot it is on default

(Excuse my english I am french)

I face a strange problem too with the memory place given by Nemo concerning all files, it is increased by some 5 to 10% and even on NTFS volumes

nb : gsmartcontrol don't recognize my 2 Hard disks

[Menard]

I didn't find how to edit this post so i add this : finally gsmartcontrol was able to recognise my hard disks, but I am not sure this may have a relation with the CPU issue.

[Duijndam156]

There are specific graphics cards that can pair with the graphics portion of AMD's APUs in a mode they call "Dual Graphics" - the performance still sucks, however, and if you buy a more powerful graphics card the GPU portion of the APU goes completely unused.

[Menard]

The A8 7600 CPU uses the 3.7Ghz turbo mode under load automatically. You can see that with cpufreq tools. Use the ACHI mode with old motherboards if I remember correctly. The CPU frequency governor slows down and can be removed from the kernel. The bios can control your CPU power usage and fans.

i don't really understand what you mean. I see the Cores frequency through the $inxi -CS command and it shows that it never go faster than 3100 MHz. But Turbo Core is 3800 MHz, visible on windows XP under HWINfo32 Application or AMD overdrive.
How can we remove this governors from the kernel ? It meens I suppose re-compiling the kernel, too complicated for me
And yes i have many settings for the MB in the bios but I don't know what is available bacause it is not a K version CPU (K = overclockable)