Fedora 20 Runs Great On The Intel Bay Trail NUC

Last month I wrote about Intel's Bay Trail NUC Kit on Linux and shared some early Intel Bay Trail Linux benchmarks. That earlier testing was done from Ubuntu 13.10 but this DN2820FYKH NUC can also be made to work quite well with Fedora 20. Here's the experience on setting up Fedora 20 for the Intel Bay Trail NUC Kit and some Ubuntu vs. Fedora benchmarks from this low-power, mini Intel system.

Like Ubuntu 13.10, Fedora 20 overall runs fine on the Intel DN2820FYKH NUC Kit with "Bay Trail" Celeron SoC. Configured for the UEFI mode, a Fedora 20 x86_64 Xfce spin quickly booted up off USB and installed just fine. Booting the system also went fine; in recent weeks with some odd cases with Ubuntu 14.04, I have run into situations with the NUC's UEFI not finding the disk to be bootable, but that did not happen at all with Fedora 20.

The big issue to be forewarned about with any Linux distribution and Bay Trail support is to ensure the Linux kernel and Mesa is new enough for handling the Bay Trail's graphics, which are roughly a chopped-down "Ivy Bridge" derived HD Graphics core. The Linux graphics enablement for this hardware has been ongoing for months -- back to the "Valley View" codename. For best support of the NUC Kit and the Bay Trail graphics, you will need Mesa 9.2 or newer and the Linux 3.13 kernel or newer. Fedora 20 shipped with the Linux 3.11 kernel and 3D acceleration wasn't working fully upon the clean installation for the DN2820FYKH.

Fortunately, Fedora pushes down major kernel releases as stable package updates, so when updating the freshly installed system it was onto the Linux 3.13 kernel... When booting Fedora 20 with its current Linux 3.13 stable kernel, unfortunately, the system didn't boot. When investigating the matter, the system would hang indefinitely very early into the kernel's boot process right after reporting a duplicate EFI run-time variable. The easy approach to fixing this was just enabling the Fedora "Rawhide Kernel Nodebug" kernel. The current Fedora Rawhide kernel in the nodebug build is based on the Linux 3.14 kernel and when trying it out on the Intel Celeron N2820 hardware it booted fine and the graphics support was great.