Intel GPUs
All except one running Seti work
Nvidia GPUs
Ran all of last weekend. Currently off.
Raspberry Pis
All except two running Einsten BRP4 work
Linux testing
In my hunt to find alternatives to Windows I have been installing various Linux flavours on a couple of machines. My current leaning is towards Debian. I'd like to get an up to date kernel and they have an up-coming release called Stretch. When exactly it will be available is a guess, but maybe April 2017. Why do I need the later kernel, well those AMD Ryzen machines need an up to date kernel to correctly run tasks on them.
I spent a lot of time last weekend and again this weekend installing and re-installing to find out that either upgrading to Stretch or installing via the Stretch net-install (RC2) doesn't work and you lose the desktop.
At the moment I've setup a virtual machine and I'm on the 2nd reinstall of Debian after it decided to remove my entire desktop due to doing apt-get remove gstreamer* and apt-get autoremove commands.
I did have a play with Mint 18.1 (Serena) which is visually great however I don't want a full-blown desktop system just to run on the number crunchers and possibly storage servers. A light-weight desktop is enough for my needs. I can even work with no desktop and use the command-line if needed.
Storage server
I have ordered a bunch of 4TB hard disks and a 2U 12 bay storage server. Its taken almost 2 weeks of back and forth with the shop to get it configured the way I want.
I currently have a Windows-based file server with a RAID controller and 4 x 4TB hard disks and while it works fine expanding its capacity is rather difficult. As it turns out the one I am buying uses the same motherboard as my existing file server, so I may just rebuild it later into the same configuration and use it to backup the new one.
Ryzen woes
After the PC Case Gear payment portal decided it didn't like me being behind a corporate firewall I haven't placed my order. That turned out to be a good thing because there are a couple of major issues with them.
First the motherboard people are having to correct issues with their BIOS so most motherboards are hard to find at the moment.
Second the windows task scheduler doesn't understand they are hyper-threaded chips and so it moves tasks around more than it should effecting performance. That will probably require Microsoft to provide an update. How long and which versions of windows it will be available for is unknown. Linux (if you have an up to date kernel) doesn't have this issue.
Once these issues are ironed out I think they'll provided a great replacement for my 6 core/12 thread machines and I will place my order. I need to sell off my old hardware to make room for the new stuff.
2 comments:
I got an encouraging message from Brod regarding my Linux journey. I won't publish it here in order to protect his privacy as it had email addresses. Thanks Brod.
I should add that I did get beignet running in the end. I find that running iGPU tasks significantly slows down the other tasks running on the CPU. It doesn't matter if they are Windows or Linux. This is to do with the design of the iGPU on the i7-6700 and the on-chip cache. Its more efficient to just run CPU tasks on them.
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