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JOURNAL FOR FRIDAY 26TH MAY, 2023
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SUBJECT: Modern technology ain’t what it used to be
DATE: Fri 26 May 22:23:44 BST 2023
Joy and excitement last Friday when my new PC arrived earlier than expected.
Due to having a lot going on I didn’t get to play with it until Saturday. That
was when my joy and excitement was obliterated and replaced by frustration and
disappointment :(
Let me back up a little here. Now it could be because I’m a noob when it comes
to Linux and especially Debian. I’ve only been using Debian for nearly three
decades, Linux longer, and still learning. Perhaps that is why it took me over
10 damn hours just to get a minimal base install up and running? That’s 10
frustrating hours of tweaking UEFI settings, rebooting and reinstalling over
and over trying to get anything to work without the Debian installer crapping
out trying to install Grub.
Having only a mobile phone at hand and trying to search for answers is a joke.
Eventually it was a chance comment in a long thread on a random forum that
gave me a clue. It turns out that UEFI has a limitation and does not like it
if you install with the UEFI boot partition, also called ESP, in a RAID setup.
I’d actually specified two 1Tb NVMe drives in the PC configuration with the
specific intent of setting up RAID1 on the drives. I wanted a RAID dammit :(
What I ended up doing was creating an ESP partition of 512Mb at the start of
both drives and then partitioning the rest of the drive as EXT4 and only
adding the EXT4 partitions to the RAID. The second ESP I left empty for now.
After installing you can, apparently, RAID the ESP partitions. UEFI will then
look at the first ESP partition before the RAID is assembled at boot. After
finally getting a bootable system I thought bugger that… and left it alone.
For those wondering, there is no legacy mode BIOS on this system :( While I’m
forced to use UEFI, I’m damned if I’m throwing secure boot into the mix too.
Once I had a running system I needed to restore 1Tb of data from my backup
server. Started to transfer the data… at a rate of 3-4Mb/s or about 70-80
hours to restore… WTF!?
It turns out the built-in Intel I219-LM 2.5Gb ethernet uses the e1000e which
has many problems. I have tried so many fixes and tweaks it’s unreal. There
was a driver bug which caused throughput to be limited to 60%, but the fix has
already landed in my kernel. For now I’m using a 3 port USB 2.0 hub with
built-in RTL-8152 based 10/100 ethernet — I only have a 10/100 network anyway
and can get over 11MB/s with the adapter.
Next problem to solve was why my KVM+QEMU Windows 10 VMs either hung at boot
or only used two cores. It turns out that KVM+QEMU will not use anything other
than one core and one thread per core if you have performance and efficiency
cores. As Windows 10 Pro will only let you have a maximum of two sockets you
are stuck with two sockets, one core per socket and one thread per core. That
only took half a day to work out. Apparently that might be fixed “real soon”.
Although Windows 10 does not work well with Intel’s thread director anyway,
Windows 11 is supposed to be better. For Windows 11 I’d just need to get TPM
pass-through working…
No amount of CPU affinity and pinning is going to save you here either :|
Most annoying is that with nearly any socket/cpu/thread configuration the
Windows 10 automatic recovery and diagnosis, performed after an unclean
shutdown, will always run :|
The alder lake i9-12900T CPU is 12th generation and 16 months old. However,
support for it and supporting chipsets seems to be lacking still. I can’t even
get voltages and fan speed information out of lm-sensors. Good job I didn’t go
for a 13th generation raptor lake CPU!
I’ve spent so much time trouble-shooting, and trying to work at my day job,
that I’ve done little else with the PC. I did manage a couple of comparisons
against the old i5-2400 it replaced:
i9-12900T i5-2400
--------- -------
Build Go 1.20.4: 7m5s 11m29s
Mere benchmark: 141ms 399ms (counter.mr)
After spending over £2,000 for a new PC that is supposed to last me for quite
a while, I am mightily underwhelmed at best. As the problems get sorted out,
or worked around, my opinion may improve. The only saving grace is that the
new PC gets a clean bill of health on the Spectre/Meltdown checker[1]. It’s
also quite nice for the odd game of Minecraft ;)
--
Diddymus
[1] The i5-2400 always had a clean bill of health on the Spectre/Meltdown
checker. It only had 4 cores and one thread per core, no SMT.
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