Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf-ZCLZIpdjs0kJGwgDXS7ZQA(a)public.gmane.org> writes: At least with the kind of laptops I work with (these days, mostly Thinkpads), the troublefree graphics were onboard Intel. No problem either suspending or hibernating, no "not-yet-serviced" or "no-longer-serviced" problems, no binary blobs, no crashes, no black screen of graphics death (Nvidia on Thinkpad T61), no gradual deterioration until death (AMD on mainboard I think), no loss of support (AMD on external card I think), no crashes for accelerated desktop. Probably no useful gaming performance either, but then I wouldn't know. I don't know whether Intel still deals in onboard graphics and particularly not in relation to desktop computers. But at least with laptops and over about a decade of experience, they have by far been the least problematic with Linux for me. If you don't need the kind of rendering performance graphics cards specialize in, don't pay the price in stability and non-support the market leaders exact. -- David Kastrup

Am Donnerstag, den 14.12.2017, 12:50 +0000 schrieb Will Godfrey: My Thinkpad T410 (with Intel Iron Lake GPU) often had hangups when writing a lot of text - interestingly, clicking with the mouse never caused crashes... On the other hand, I never had any issues on desktop computers with AMD graphics (discrete or APU), whether it may be for realtime audio or for gaming since the time AMD opened up their GPUs driver development. To me, AMD has been the first choice regarding graphics for years, now... Greets Mitsch

On December 14, 2017 12:32:34 PM HST, Roberto <roberto(a)zenvoid.org> wrote: Well, my laptop (System76) and my wife's (Asus) both have Intel GPU and work. Only issue on her laptop is the onboard display rez is lower than the 1920HD external display also attached to it and Ubuntu apparently can only run each display at identical resolutions. She dualboots Windows 10, which has no problem running them each at different optimal resolutions. My desktop, with AMD CPU and Radeon onboard (MSI mobo IIRC), also works fine. Both my laptop and the desktop run KXStudio RT kernels. My wife's laptop runs stock Ubuntu 16.04LTS. I do no gaming, so don't presently need the horsepower of any modern GPU. Although going to a 4K setup someday will probably require it. -- David W. Jones gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail.

Le Wed, 13 Dec 2017 23:48:28 +0100, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf(a)alice-dsl.net> a écrit : Hi, No problem here on a 3 years old asus laptop with the radeon FLOSS driver. The rt kernel is working just fine, with hibernation and so. The only thing that make hiberbation to fail is a running virtualbox, but I guess that's normal. Best, Dominique

On December 14, 2017 10:51:23 AM HST, Len Ovens <len(a)ovenwerks.net> wrote: My laptop (2.4Ghz, 4 core 8 HT) gives me more throughput than the 2.8Ghz, 4 core no HT AMD Phenom 2 in my desktop. I've tried some i5 systems, they seem slow to me. I've had no issues with xruns and hyperthreading on my laptop. Since I do large panoramas on the laptop, I need the higher core/HT counts. I might move the desktop to an 8 core/16HT Ryzen sometime. Fits budget better than Intel now. I like the Asus boards, too. The BIOS in my wife's laptop is marvelously configurable! With a modern motherboard and USB3.1/USB-C, I'd go with an external USB card. Also, there'd be the option to use Apple's Firewire to USB-C cable to hook a Firewire device in. But with a desktop, you could just add a Firewire PCIe adaptor, yes? -- David W. Jones gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail.

On Thu, 14 Dec 2017 13:35:55 -1000, David W. Jones wrote: https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/208095469-USB-2-0-vs-USB-3-0 FWIW the issues for at least the revision of the RME HDSPe AIO I'm using are still not fixed. Apart from not providing all ADAT IOs and that Ardour can't be used with plain ALSA instead of Jack, even high frame sizes can't avoid xruns. My Scarlett 18i20 works without xruns at lower frame sizes, while all 18 inputs and 20 outputs are available. It was the same for my old AMD based computer with USB 2, as it is now for my Intel based computer with USB 3. I never checked MIDI jitter of the Focusrite, it might be that my PCI Envy24 card and the PCIe RME card are much better in this regard. IOW I only use PCI/PCIe MIDI, but never really tested the Focusrite. If would buy a new audio device, I would chose an USB class compliant RME interface. -- $ pacman -Q linux{,-rt{,-cornflower,-pussytoes}}|awk '{print $2}' 4.14.4-1 4.13.13_rt5-1 4.11.12_rt16-1 4.14.3_rt5-1

On Fri, 15 Dec 2017 10:06:02 +0100 David Kastrup <dak(a)gnu.org> wrote: Thanks everyone for your comments. They have all been very informative. This last is a major factor in me deciding the go for AMD. I did notice that as soon as the Ryzen series was publicised Intel started talking about new processors and price reductions. @Ralf MIDI jitter is a big problem for me, but I've been able to pin it down fairly well. It's almost entirely due to a problem between the chair and the keyboard. Nothing I do seems to improve the situation. -- Will J Godfrey http://www.musically.me.uk Say you have a poem and I have a tune. Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.

On Sat, 30 Dec 2017 18:05:46 +0100 Thomas Poulsen <thomas(a)lha66.dk> wrote: I still don't have it yet! It will be built to order during January. Definitely will be a Ryzen. Soundcard etc. yet to be finalised - depending on piggy bank contents :) -- Will J Godfrey http://www.musically.me.uk Say you have a poem and I have a tune. Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.

On Thu, 4 Jan 2018 10:17:54 +0100, Jeremy Jongepier wrote: Don't believe the hype! It's gonzo journalism. Yes, there is a serious issue with Intel CPUs, but similar issues apply to AMD (and other) CPUs, too. At the moment they are speaking about low vulnerability for AMD CPUs, but this easily could change soon. It's like talking about the "Volkswagen emissions scandal". "Volkswagen" was the first, but not the last company involved in this particular "Diesel emissions scandal". In the past I used AMD for Linux audio only, now I'm using my first Intel CPU for Linux and in my experiences Linux works that much better with Intel, that I consider to get a more powerful Intel setup (right after upgrading my Apple audio setup ;). -- $ pacman -Q linux{,-rt{,-cornflower,-pussytoes}}|awk '{print $2}' 4.14.11-1 4.14.6_rt7-1 4.11.12_rt16-1 4.14.8_rt9-2

Will Godfrey <willgodfrey(a)musically.me.uk> writes: [...] I'm glad I'm not the only one who was worried about how this will affect possible track count and plugin capacity. :) On the bright side, as you have mentioned, there seems to be little impact for AMD CPU's, which is what I'm using. However, it looks like all of the free and closed OS vendors are treating this as a design problem that needs to be fixed regardless of chip type, and most of what I'm getting from what I've read has been that KPTI patches to fix this will not discriminate CPU type (will do the same thing on AMD machines that they do on Intel). They are not absolutely sure that the Meltdown vulnerability cannot be used against AMD, so they're not chancing it, and they're doing better kernel/userspace isolation for everyone. Also on a positive note, Phoronix, who are a site very oriented to gaming on Linux and not plugging for Intel or AMD either one, had a story today saying that they had found the KPTI patches to have very little affect on fullscreen frame rate in video games: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-linux-kpti&a… It's possible that all the doom and gloom from the benchmarks that said we'd get getting ~30% performance loss may be measuring contrived situations, as benchmark tests so often do anyway. Probably the only way to really know will be to run a patched kernel and see what happens to you when you try to run a heavy session in Ardour or QTracktor. With luck, it will be the same as Phoronix found for gaming -- not really quite as bad as the benchmarks implied. -- - Brent Busby + =============================================== + With the rise of social networking -- Studio -- + sites, computers are making people -- Amadeus -- + easier to use every day. ----------------+ ===============================================

On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 2:43 PM, Robin Gareus <robin(a)gareus.org> wrote: ​is this correct? my impression is that KPTI makes user->kernel and kernel->user switches more expensive th​a they used to be, but does not change the cost of a context switch that stays in the same ring mode. ​ so, basically, system calls cost more; context switches stay at about the same cost.

On 04/01/18 19:56, Paul Davis wrote: https://lwn.net/Articles/741878/ - top-most page table is duplicated and stripped of kernel pages; duplicate is active when running userspace.

So for a DAW "There will be a nopti command-line option to disable this mechanism at boot time." Let alone that there might be easier to use targets for an attacker: [rocketmouse@archlinux ~]$ echo $(arch-audit -f "%n | " | sort) | sed s/.$// binutils | cairo | exiv2 | ffmpeg | ffmpeg2.8 | glibc | jasper | lame | lib32-glibc | lib32-openssl | libffi | libvorbis | linux | mkinitcpio-busybox | openssl | pcre | perl-xml-libxml | rsync | zziplib [rocketmouse@archlinux ~]$ arch-audit --upgradable --quiet lib32-openssl>=1:1.1.0.h-1 openssl>=1.1.0.h-1 perl-xml-libxml>=2.0130-1 For more information see https://security.archlinux.org/ . Let alone the risk of using the Ubuntu "universe" repository: "Canonical does not provide a guarantee of regular security updates for software in the universe component, but will provide these where they are made available by the community. Users should understand the risk inherent in using these packages." - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories#Universe It for example Ubuntu provides webkitgtk still for bionic: https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 For more information see https://usn.ubuntu.com/usn/ . It makes me wonder that people care about performance issues by something that could be disabled and that isn't needed for a DAW at all. If the DAW is used for something else, simply reboot without disabling. But again, many users don't care about all the vulnerability caused by using the Ubuntu "universe" repository, so booting with nopti seems to be the last to worry about. Btw. using a pulseaudio bridge when running jackd might cause real-time issues, too. In short, it's hysteric to decide against an Intel CPU in favour of an AMD CPU, if the reason should be performance concerns regarding KPTI.