Intel Atom Bay Trail NUC Kit On Linux

The DN2820FYK did much better than the earlier Bay Trail ASUS Transformer Book in running Linux thanks to supporting 64-bit UEFI. Ubuntu 13.10 quickly booted up on the system.

Ubuntu 13.10 was able to boot up to the Live USB in no time, but when hitting the Unity desktop it was quickly realized that 3D hardware acceleration wasn't quite right. This wasn't too much of a surprise though given how much I've written about Intel Bay Trail Linux improvements in dozens of articles and knowing the best results will be from slightly newer software versions. From the clean Ubuntu 13.10 install to this Bay Trail system, the Oibaf PPA was enabled and from there with the updated Mesa (10.2-devel) and xf86-video-intel DDX, OpenGL support was working fine.

Besides the graphics, everything else seemed to work okay from this Linux 3.11 kernel except for an occasional kernel panic and separately a USB issue at boot sometimes. On some boots, the USB keyboard and mouse would not be working. After trying out some options, it was discovered that by default the Intel Visual BIOS had legacy USB support enabled but when disabling the legacy USB support, this Linux USB issue was rectified and was booting fine with full USB connectivity.

With wanting a newer kernel for better graphics support and for the kernel panic on some boots, I decided to try the mainline Linux 3.13 kernel from the Ubuntu mainline kernel archive.

When trying the 3.13.0-031300-generic 64-bit Ubuntu Linux kernel, the system would always just hang after "Loading initial ramdisk..." After trying a Linux 3.14 (post-RC1) Git kernel from yesterday, the system booted fine without hangs or kernel panics and was overall in better shape than the previous Linux kernel releases. For the Phoronix testing of this Atom Bay Trail NUC, testing will be done from the Linux 3.14 kernel.