Early Ubuntu Hardware/Software Survey Data

[coder]

There are servers that can run 2 or 4 physical CPUs on the same motherboard (each with its own RAM and PCIe lanes, but working together under the same OS).

Intel supports cache coherency for up to 8-CPU configurations, in its highest-end server CPUs. AMD's EPYC only scales up to dual-CPU, which is probably the biggest that makes sense for most applications.

Intel's LGA 3647 supports up to 3 UPI links, meaning quad-CPU is the biggest you can go with a fully-connected topology. I'll bet they don't actually scale well, going from 4 to 8 CPUs.

[coder]

A bit odd they count how many CPUs you have, but not cores or threads.

I wonder whether Threadripper and EPYC show up as 1 CPU. Reason being that, for scheduling purposes, you want to treat each die as a different CPU.

I guess the real question is: how many levels of NUMA hierarchy does the Linux kernel support?

[Vistaus]

Maybe because you can surf the web during the Ubuntu installation and some people didn't notice that they need to press restart to finish the installation?

Also, quite a few people use Ubuntu to save old computers. Old computers usually have slow(er) HDD's, which makes the process longer as well.

[starshipeleven]

I didn't know that. Is it on all flavours? Only if it's in all flavours, desktop environments statitics would make sense.

There would still be bias toward the default Ubuntu flavor though, and possibly against KDE (as many KDE users use Neon or Argon derivatives of Ubuntu)

[olympus]

The survey is in mate too.

I didn't know that. Is it on all flavours? Only if it's in all flavours, desktop environments statitics would make sense.

[schmidtbag]

I don't find it strange at all. Unlike games (e.g. Steam survey) that are optimized for high clocks and low core counts, a general purpose Linux OS will benefit from as many cores as you can throw at it. I can see where game devs care about core counts, since historically most games have not been written to take advantage of more than 4 cores (and many even less than 4). If 90% of the install base is using 4 cores, why spend the money to thread the game beyond 4 cores? For an OS vendor though, what difference does it make whether the user has 4 cores or 8 or 16? We all know the Linux OS will schedule processes accordingly.

I mostly agree, but my point was more a matter of how the data is acquired in the first place. You can easily get number of cores/threads just from /proc/cpuinfo or lscpu (or even simpler, nproc, if the system has that command installed). I'm not aware of built-in functionality that can easily tell you how many CPU sockets you have.

In other words, you can pretty effortlessly figure out how many cores/threads a system has, but it's not so easy to identify how many CPUs you have, and yet Canonical didn't gather the easy-to-get info while going out of their way for the harder-to-get info.

What an OS vendor might care about however, is socket count. One socket tells us it's probably a consumer grade desktop or laptop peecee. Two sockets is a professional workstation or small/medium server. Four+ sockets is a big honkin mega server. Knowing this gives them valuable info on where their OS is being deployed.

Just being devil's advocate: you could have a dual-socket motherboard with only 8 total cores and 8 threads, meanwhile there are single-CPU systems with 32 cores and 64 threads. Sure, the dual-socket setup was more advanced for its time, but the 32-core system is obviously more capable. There is some validity in your point, but if Canonical doesn't have all the data, they're not getting the whole picture.

[PackRat]

As far as I know the survey is only on Ubuntu not in Ubuntu flavours.

The survey is in mate too.

[olympus]

Where is the desktop environment statistics? I can't see gnome 3 being popular with people with 4 gb ram.

As far as I know the survey is only on Ubuntu not in Ubuntu flavours.

[PackRat]

Where is the desktop environment statistics? I can't see gnome 3 being popular with people with 4 gb ram.

[calc]

Why so long? My Arch installs only take 10 and that's to get a full desktop up and running.

Probably old systems, I just did a test install of 18.04 and from system power on to reboot took less than 6 minutes. Probably closer to 5 minutes in the installer itself.