Leap 42.2 and skylake

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi all

will I have to give up on Opensure before 42.2 is even launched? I have a skylake machine and I really wanted to become part of the opensuse family but with Kernel 4.4 I cannot get my Skylake machine to perform satisfactory. This problem exists with all distros and only from kernel 4.7.6 onwards there seem to be no problems (no more power drain and choppy video playback, no more screen tearing).

I put a lot of hopes on 42.2 but now I see it is still build around Kernel 4.4. I also tried tumbleweed but I seemed to have too many bugs and I am not skilled enough to manually fix things myself.

Are there any official patches for skylake on leap?

2

Hi
Probably better to have posted in the install/boot forum :wink: will move thread…

3

Hi and welcome to the forum :slight_smile:
Moved and re-opened.

Have you tried kernel options for the i915 kernel module on the 4.4 kernel?

Add via YaST Bootloader kernel commandline options;


i915.preliminary_hw_support=1

There are many more if you run the command;


/sbin/modinfo i915 | grep parm

You could also look at using the kernel:stable (4.8.x) or kernel:HEAD (>=4.9.x) repo?

4

Great thank you. It’s worth a try. Currently downloading the RC2 Iso. One question, would using a high Kernel affect the stability? What I am confused about: If it is no problem upgrading to a higher Kernel like 4.8 why isn’t it included by default?

5

Hi
Hard to say, the kernel:stable is one waiting to appear in Tumbleweed, if you create a kernel bug report most of the time they ask you to try kernel:HEAD to duplicate, then push fixes there and maybe backport to the earlier releases (they did for my amdgpu issues, fixes are in 4.8.5), 4.4.x is a long term support release which is why it’s in openSUSE Leap 42.2 and SLE 12 SP4 from a maintenance point of view.

I’ve had no issues running the latest from Kernel:HEAD repo on Tumbleweed, but have now rolled it back to standard 4.48.4 (well fresh install last evening to test…) and waiting for 4.8.5 to appear.

6

Hi Simon,
a few days ago I’ve assembled a new PC with skylake.

With Leap 42.1 it was a disaster. Let’s imagine vertical tearing plus an horizontal half-blank screen depending on the position of the mouse. Add to this several random freezes.

Si I’ve updated the bios (mobo Asrock H110M) and installed Leap 42.2, build 250: now the PC works perfectly, nothing less.
IMO you should give it a try.

7

Great that is good feedback. When you say you assembled a I presume it has a dedicated graphics card or was it Intel HD? Are you running KDE or GNOME?

8

Here with Leap 42.2 also all is working, no grub Parameter needed.

9

Intel HD530, monitor connected via HDMI, Gnome.

10

Based on my experience with Leap 42.2 and Skylake + build in graphics:
0. Normal KDE/Gnome desktop as well as text mode works without any issues. That includes office, browsers, etc applications

  1. One must update after install to get VNC server working
  2. As of 17 November 2016 (2 days after release) - I cannot get any video players working. I am not sure why, they just do not play any videos outside the browser. Pacman repositories will not help at this moment.

Hope it helps …

11

Since there was no change to not being able to play movies, I dug little deeper and fixed it by installing packman:libavcodec57 instead that from openSuSE:

sudo zypper install packman:libavcodec57

let it changed the vendor to packman.

This has resolved my problems with playing movies.
So the problem does not seem to have been Skylake related.

12

I have also a Skylake system which I have purchased in March 2016 and spent a lot of time to get rid of the random freezes.
The solution was to set these additional kernel parameters:

nouveau.modeset=0 elevator=deadline i915.preliminary_hw_support=1 i915.enable_rc6=0

The “elevator” parameter is not really needed. I set this parameter because of my SSD.

I removed those additional kernel parameters right after I have installed kernel version 4.6.3.
I stick to that version until I upgrade to 42.2 in the near future.

13

For the sake of clarity, I found these informative tidbits. It might help you decide if you want to go with the kernel source solution or enter parameters.

The term “preliminary hardware support” has always caused confusion both among users and developers. It has always been about preliminary driver support for new hardware, and not so much about preliminary hardware. Of course, initially both the software and hardware are in early stages, but the distinction becomes more clear when the user picks up production hardware and an older kernel to go with it, with just the early support we had for the hardware at the time the kernel was released. The user has to specifically enable the alpha quality driver support for the hardware in that specific kernel version.
https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/119316/

and this:

Module-based Powersaving Options

The i915 kernel module allows for configuration via module options.
A list of all options along with short descriptions and default values can be generated with the following command:
$ modinfo -p i915
To check which options are currently enabled, run

systool -m i915 -av

You will note that many options default to -1, resulting in per-chip powersaving defaults. It is however possible to configure more aggressive powersaving by using module options.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/intel_graphics

Note: You may want to be very careful when straying from the defaults.