Support for Intel 12th or 13th gen on FreeBSD RELEASE 13.1? reddit / freebsd ---------------------------------------------------------------------- InternalMulberry · 2023-04-05 08:41 Today is my birthday, and I need a new home server. :-) My basic requirements are: \- A energy efficient processor that can run 1-2 linux or FreeBSD VMs in BHYVE. \- Support for Intel's Quicksync video transcoding on the host. I'm trying to find information about how FreeBSD handles Intels new efficiency and performance cores in their 12th and 13th gen processors. As far as I have been able to find out by duckduck-going the net and Reddit, FreeBSD 13.X runs on these processors, but the question is how well? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- player1dk · 2023-04-05 10:52 Happy birthday! And a not-answer; have you considered a Mac Mini M1/M2 instead? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gizahnl · 2023-04-05 11:20 Not yet. Look at drm-kmod on GitHub, there's a PR upgrading the imported Linux drivers to 5.17, but it requires 14-current and isn't ready yet. -edit- this was solely written wrt GPU support, as for P and E core scheduling I have no idea. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- InternalMulberry · 2023-04-05 12:03 Thank you! Yes, I actually have a M1 Mac Mini running MacOS. But for several reasons not related to my original question it does not fulfill all my needs. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- InternalMulberry · 2023-04-05 12:04 Thanks, that is relevant information. Perhaps I should get a 11th gen CPU instead. And in 5 years or so the GPU and CPU support is fully there. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gizahnl · 2023-04-05 12:09 I'm guessing it would be a lot quicker tbh. Might be close to or past 6.1 before 14 gets released. The guy doing the PR's seems to be slogging along quite enthusiastically. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- rfreidel · 2023-04-05 13:46 This may not answer your questions, but I am running FreeBSD 13.2-RC6 on an Intel 12600k. Here's a message from boot. \~\~\~\~ CPU: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-12600K (3686.40-MHz K8-class CPU) Origin="GenuineIntel" Id=0x90672 Family=0x6 Model=0x97 Stepping=2 Features=0xbfebfbff Features2=0x7ffafbff AMD Features=0x2c100800 AMD Features2=0x121 Structured Extended Features=0x239c27eb Structured Extended Features2=0x98c027bc Structured Extended Features3=0xfc1cc410 XSAVE Features=0xf IA32\_ARCH\_CAPS=0x88fd6b VT-x: PAT,HLT,MTF,PAUSE,EPT,UG,VPID,VID,PostIntr TSC: P-state invariant, performance statistics hwpstate\_intel0: on cpu0 hwpstate\_intel1: on cpu1 hwpstate\_intel2: on cpu2 hwpstate\_intel3: on cpu3 hwpstate\_intel4: on cpu4 hwpstate\_intel5: on cpu5 hwpstate\_intel6: on cpu6 hwpstate\_intel7: on cpu7 hwpstate\_intel8: on cpu8 hwpstate\_intel9: on cpu9 hwpstate\_intel10: on cpu10 hwpstate\_intel11: on cpu11 hwpstate\_intel12: on cpu12 hwpstate\_intel13: on cpu13 hwpstate\_intel14: on cpu14 hwpstate\_intel15: on cpu15 \~\~\~\~ Right now CPU is idling @ 26c. My main interest is gaming, currently have The Witcher 2 & 3 running great. This morning I also installed Metro Exodus, it runs perfectly. To run these it is necessary to install a different build of wine & wine-proton than is available from ports/pkg, I am also using a patched Nvidia 525.89.02 installed via ports. I switched from FreeBSD to archlinux only for gaming some years ago, recently got back into FreeBSD mostly out of boredom with Linux. At this point gaming is far superior on FreeBSD, only issue is I have not yet succeeded in getting dx12 games to run, only dx11, but they run faster on FreeBSD. Can't answer question about Intel's Quicksync video ---------------------------------------------------------------------- InternalMulberry · 2023-04-05 14:44 >drm-kmod I believe that this is github issue you're referring to: [https://github.com/freebsd/drm- kmod/issues/219](https://github.com/freebsd/drm-kmod/issues/219) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gizahnl · 2023-04-05 14:45 Actually this PR: https://github.com/freebsd/drm-kmod/pull/236 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- InternalMulberry · 2023-04-05 14:48 Thank you for the boot message. What should I take from it besides that it recognizes [Intel Speed Shift](https://edc.intel.com/content/www/us/en/design/ipla/software- development-platforms/client/platforms/alder-lake-desktop/12th- generation-intel-core-processors-datasheet-volume-1-of-2/004/intel- speed-shift-technology/)? And what does idling at 26c mean? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- rfreidel · 2023-04-05 15:02 >idling at 26c mean? Well, my assumption is that the CPU is well supported, it runs cool when at an idle state, yet when under heavy load (compiling world) it runs quickly. Some years ago I was a system admin running FreeBSD on old 4 CPU servers, I would ssh in screen... buildworld, come back next day to see the end of it, on this system I can buildworld while eating breakfast. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- IanArcad · 2023-04-07 23:04 Alder Lake has two issues right now. The first is the iGPU, which AFAIK isn't supported yet, and the second is that FreeBSD doesn't know how to assign threads & processes to specific types of cores (because Alder Lake has two different types, Performance and Efficient). Neither of these are really show stoppers, since you can always get a dedicated GPU if you need to - or even run without acceleration with some of the older low performance drivers I think - and it may not make any difference to you which cores your threads run on. OTOH you don't have to deal with either of those issues if you have or you can get a quality 10th/11th gen or AM4 setup. > I need a new home server. In my own experience home servers are really hard to spec and I always end up going through lots of iterations of hardware. One of the best decisions that I made was to get a Fractal Node 804 case, which supports micro atx boards and 8 hard drives. I originally ran it with high performance CPUs (a 12 core / 24 thread at one point), but lately have seen the wisdom / utility in using cheaper, lower power CPUs. > Today is my birthday Happy belated birthday! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MikeKarels · 2023-04-08 22:33 There is a cache invalidation problem with the E-cores on Alder Lake and probably Raptor Lake in 13.1 and earlier. This can cause file system corruption in UFS and MSDOSFS file systems. There is a proper workaround in 13.2, due out in days. It should be possible to run 13.1 by placing "vm.pmap.pcid_enabled=0" in /boot/loader.conf and rebooting, but using 13.2 is preferred.