Linux 5.15, AMD / Radeon Advancements, Intel SDSi Dominated Discussions This Month

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 5.15, AMD / Radeon Advancements, Intel SDSi Dominated Discussions This Month

That's a wrap for September with 229 original news articles and another 13 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles, all written by your's truly. It was another eventful month with Linux 5.15 moving forward, a lot of driver activity by AMD and Intel, and other open-source milestones like the release of GNOME 41 and the shipping of the Ubuntu 21.10 and Fedora 35 beta releases...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=September-2021-Highlights

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

Where did sep21 go ?

[perpetually high]

Wow. My birthday is Sep 21. Talk about a conspiracy.

edit: Got some exciting benchmarks for y'all

So I got a new WD Blue 2TB SSD for a great price and decided to upgrade the old Samsung 128GB SSD in my 2010 MBP (using rEFInd and 20.04 LTS just installed perfectly. Very impressed)

(btw I tried zfs, and pretty cool, but man, it benchmarked extremely slow. I also didn't know how to recover from a failed boot with chroot and I'm on extremely low on time, so I wiped again and said no more zfs for now.)

I installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and ran benchmarks with a fresh install (all the updates, focal-proposed, and oibaf ppa). I'm using nouveau btw. Had a few freezes and hangs but now everything is absolutely perfect. I won't be installing nvidia-340 proprietary drivers. System is awesome. I can even run the latest 5.15 kernel. No longer bounded to 5.4 LTS kernel (nvidia-340 ends support there)

GRUB parameters, fyi: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nosoftlockup mitigations=off psi=0 audit=0 mce=ignore_ce"

Anyways, here are the benchmarks:

https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2110017-TJ-OSBENCHUB77

https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2110018-TJ-CTXCLOCKU90

https://openbenchmarking.org/result/...TJ-UBUNTU20057 (fresh install, just shows ctx before and after mitigations)

too lazy; didn't click



My custom 5.4 kernel with all the bells and whistles is not to be messed with, boys. Please respect the struggle.

Also, I was able to track down all the pre-reqs to get going on Ubuntu, so I will add that to the script soon and it should be all automated from there.

Cheers all. Keep tweaking and keeping the dream alive.

[perpetually high]

Through the end of the month (30 September, regardless of timezone), you can "go premium" at the Oktoberfest rate. Normally Phoronix Premium costs $35 USD per year or $150 for a lifetime subscription. For this year's Oktoberfest deal, you can go premium for just $25 per year or $100 for a lifetime subscription.

Killer deal. Hope people took advantage

(Btw Michael, would be cool to give the lifetimers the "Lifetime Member" badge on their name instead of Senior Member. We're not going anywhere. We are the proud, we are the few.)

[skeevy420]

(btw I tried zfs, and pretty cool, but man, it benchmarked extremely slow. I also didn't know how to recover from a failed boot with chroot and I'm on extremely low on time, so I wiped again and said no more zfs for now.)

You don't run ZFS for speed. It can be tuned towards performance, but, IMHO, it's more about reliability than speed. With ZFS, the solution is first to throw fast hardware at the problem...SSD cache and metadata drives, stuff like that...and then go for performance knobs because, like BTRFS, nearly every tick towards moar performance removes some form of cover your ass (like removing checksumming on datasets you don't care if they lose data).

Recovery varies by distribution and initial setup. Not sure how it's done on Ubuntu due to their use of Zsys (I stuck with their kernels when I tried 20.04 ZFS out). On an Arch install it's usually new kernel related and the solution is to chroot in and downgrade the kernel or switch over to LTS and let DKMS do its thing. Ubuntu 20.04 uses ZFS 0.8.3 which only supports up to kernel 5.4 (per OpenZFS changelog) and I'm assuming Ubuntu has pulled in patches for newer kernel versions due to their zfs-dkms 0.8.3 showing 5.11 support in their package (just thought it was worth mentioning).

[perpetually high]

You don't run ZFS for speed. It can be tuned towards performance, but, IMHO, it's more about reliability than speed. With ZFS, the solution is first to throw fast hardware at the problem...SSD cache and metadata drives, stuff like that...and then go for performance knobs because, like BTRFS, nearly every tick towards moar performance removes some form of cover your ass (like removing checksumming on datasets you don't care if they lose data).

Recovery varies by distribution and initial setup. Not sure how it's done on Ubuntu due to their use of Zsys (I stuck with their kernels when I tried 20.04 ZFS out). On an Arch install it's usually new kernel related and the solution is to chroot in and downgrade the kernel or switch over to LTS and let DKMS do its thing. Ubuntu 20.04 uses ZFS 0.8.3 which only supports up to kernel 5.4 (per OpenZFS changelog) and I'm assuming Ubuntu has pulled in patches for newer kernel versions due to their zfs-dkms 0.8.3 showing 5.11 support in their package (just thought it was worth mentioning).

Really appreciate all that info, skeevy420. zfs definitely looks interesting. Love the snapshots and all that. (They were building up quick but easy to wipe out and start fresh again).

I was reading this article on ZFS ("6 Reasons Why ZFS is the Most Astonishing File System Ever Made") and that had me intrigued and got me to pull the trigger. Will revisit in the future for sure. Thanks again.

[skeevy420]

Really appreciate all that info, skeevy420. zfs definitely looks interesting. Love the snapshots and all that. (They were building up quick but easy to wipe out and start fresh again).

I was reading this article on ZFS ("6 Reasons Why ZFS is the Most Astonishing File System Ever Made") and that had me intrigued and got me to pull the trigger. Will revisit in the future for sure. Thanks again.

Just think, that was from 2013. Since then they've added better compression, multitudes of performance and bug fixes, and a lot more.

It really sucks that Ubuntu is basically the only ZFS distribution around. Like everything else Ubuntu does, they do it their own way. In this case it's the use of Zsys. Instead of doing things manually you have a layer doing things to ensure the boot environment, root environment, kernel, etc all line up whenever you do an apt transaction...which has pros and cons. It's like, while Zsys is handy in that regard, you're basically learning to use Ubuntu-isms and not necessarily ZFS-isms; that a lot of the information you'll find elsewhere may or may not apply since you had a layer doing that for you and you'll be half debugging why the layer messed up and then maybe why ZFS/dkms/GRUB/etc may have messed up. It'd be nice if other's picked up Zsys or if Ubuntu could get OpenZFS to accept it as an official ZFS management tool to encourage others to use it.

ZFS on Ubuntu is similar to BTRFS on SUSE. Both have layers in between you and filesystem. Snapper and Zsys. You don't actually learn how any of that works because they do it all for you so when something goes wrong you may not know why and you may not even know where to start if you've never messed with any of that in an in-depth level.

[perpetually high]

skeevy420 thank you for clearing that up. I found Zsys extremely annoying. You're right, I don't think I liked the bastardized version of Ubuntu's zfs, but then again, if they never automated and included it, I wouldn't have likely taken the effort to try it. It's probably good for a beginner until they get to your level.

I agree, that was from 2013, it's probably kicking ass today. Will definitely mess around more with it on the side. I'm intrigued.