Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition On Linux

Even when the first Sandy Bridge processors shipped at the beginning of the year, there was Linux support in place. The initial Sandy Bridge struggles came down to the graphics support, which is now in good shape, but that is nothing to worry about with the Sandy Bridge Extreme processors. In the past week of pounding the i7-3960X under Linux, there is only one issue to report on: the boot problem when the dynamic power technology is enabled.

The system was working flawlessly for the first few days, but then all of a sudden the Linux kernel could not successfully boot, as the CPU would stall. It is all talked about in the previous article, but the workaround I discovered was to disable the dynamic power technology, which unfortunately disables the Turbo Boost support. This issue is still being investigated.

In the forums is also a Core i7 3930X owner that's also reported a similar issue under Linux, but I have not heard of any other reports of this issue. There is also a somewhat similar Red Hat bug report for other hardware, but the workaround of blacklisting the p4-clockmod kernel module was of no help. Intel engineers have not experienced such an issue in their months of work. When any new information is discovered it will be passed along, but fortunately, the benchmarks for this article were completed before running into the Linux bug.