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Interesting difference between distros.

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HankB

Member
Joined
Jan 27, 2011
Location
Beautiful Sunny Winfield
First I'm happy to report that I solved the problems I was chasing. (*) This is WRT a Lenovo Y50 (I7-4710HQ, Intel/nVidia graphics.) The more serious issue was instability under load. Crunching any more than three threads of Rosetta (of 8 possible) would cause it so shut down. It would just stop. No panic, no lockup, just running one second and the next it was off. I was ready to send it back for repairs until another member (kind of) suggested that I test under Windows. I did and found that this laptop could crunch 8 threads of Rosetta or run Prime95 stress test with nary a hiccup. It became obvious that it was a S/W issue and not H/W. I was running Mint and tried different kernels and none seemed to make any difference. I tried Ubuntu-Mate and found that the system was stable, but whatever was controlling processor speed had it cranked down to ~700 MHz. That was irritating because I didn't spend the $$$ to idle the processor.

The next step was Manjaro. I figured it was time to try something entirely different. The install was not as polished as the more popular Debian derivatives but the Y50 was stable running it under full load. And it did not throttle the processor under load on AC or battery. In fact, it ran the cores at about 2700 MHz (Spec is 800-2500 MHz.) And it would run that way day after day without difficulty.

But I had another partition on the SSD big enough to install another distro. Si I went with another "entirely different." I installed Fedora. At first it was really annoying because it left my Manjaro partition unbootable, :bang head. I hate Grub issues. After I got that sorted, I spent some time getting my stuff set up. Right now I've got Rosetta crunching 8 threads and right now the cores are all running at 3300 MHz! That's 32% over the nominal max - well into turbo territory (at 3500 MHz.) :shock: I thought that turbo was only for short periods.

It surprised me how much difference there was between distros. They're running the same kernel, more or less. I suppose there are build options that might factor in. For example Manjaro uses a preemptive kernel. It makes me wonder just how processor speed is controlled. Apparently is is S/W and not built into the chip or controlled by the BIOS.

I thought this would be of interest here, kind of like overclocking. :D

(*) I cannot say absolutely stable at this point. As I started this post I ran 'lspci' to see if I could get the model number of the nVidia GPU. On the second execution the laptop locked up solid. Luckily I was only starting the post.

At the moment the temps are about 77°C with cores at 3300 MHz. I have seen it range up to 84°C which still isn't bad. I'm glad I repasted the CPU. ;)
 
Distros are still quite important mostly due to the kernel. I know you said you are running the same (or similar) versions of the kernel but each distro has different options compiled by default into the kernel. This makes a big difference. In addition things like Arch/Antergos (and manjero to a small extent) do things differently when it comes to user options. They generally do minimal options and let the user build up from there (for example you need to use the nvidia package out of the Arch repos, downloading from nvidia.com does not build properly

Then there is default software packages and other such things (like acpi support etc). All of these factors make a big difference. So I am not surprised you had different results
 
allways try other distros and also other flavors of those distros.
it's a bit amazing how you can get along with one ubuntu based and another just falls on its face.
one of my faves is a flavor of puppy os, lean puppy, on a 512 mb flash drive, been using it for years as downloaded.
 
It surprised me how much difference there was between distros. They're running the same kernel, more or less. I suppose there are build options that might factor in. For example Manjaro uses a preemptive kernel. It makes me wonder just how processor speed is controlled. Apparently is is S/W and not built into the chip or controlled by the BIOS.

I thought this would be of interest here, kind of like overclocking. :D

The similar distributives still can have different kernel configuration and build settings.
You can check it yourself if you try to download, compile and install the latest kernel version on your laptop
The most related option is a CPU mode and power save settings I believe.

It can be similar with the Windows performance settings. If you set it to 'power save' you can't use CPU frequency boost, etc.

I personally tend to use Debian, but can't say is it makes a different result for you if you check it instead of Mint.
 
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