Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Dear lists, I'm sorry for 2L8 reply though,I have transrated this thread into japanese in [1]. I wonder if every mail transrated correctly so please check it if you understand japanese especially by japanese lists. BTW ML mails should be obeyed by FreeBSD Copyright but it's derivative work would be going to? Regards [1] http://www.openedu.org/dkp/archive/mail/current/20140331-0517/maillist.html --- Kazuhiko Kiriyama k...@openedu.org At Mon, 31 Mar 2014 22:46:45 -0700, Eitan Adler wrote: Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely it’s that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: but you won't be able to use your graphics card? In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? Eitan Adler ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 5/12/14, 1:35 PM, Allan Jude wrote: I have this system: hw.model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1220 v3 @ 3.10GHz hw.ncpu: 4 http://ark.intel.com/products/75052 dev.cpu.0.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.0.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.0.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU0 dev.cpu.0.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.0.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.0.freq: 3100 dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 3101/8 3100/8 2900/72713 2800/69558 2600/62669 2400/56794 2300/53935 2100/47673 1900/42370 1800/39795 1600/34136 1500/31729 1300/26432 1137/23128 1100/21994 1000/19851 875/17369 800/15113 700/13223 600/11334 500/9445 400/7556 300/5667 200/3778 100/1889 dev.cpu.0.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.0.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.0.cx_usage: 9.01% 90.98% last 807us dev.cpu.1.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.1.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.1.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU1 dev.cpu.1.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.1.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.1.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.1.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.1.cx_usage: 11.70% 88.29% last 21303us dev.cpu.2.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.2.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.2.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU2 dev.cpu.2.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.2.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.2.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.2.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.2.cx_usage: 15.17% 84.82% last 22987us dev.cpu.3.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.3.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.3.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU3 dev.cpu.3.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.3.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.3.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.3.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.3.cx_usage: 11.74% 88.25% last 6073us According to the Intel specs (Page 11), this processor supports C1, C1E, C3, C6 and C7 The above sysctl dump shows only C1 and C2. I wonder if the C2 is actually C3 Yes, ACPI C states != CPU C states. Often C6/C7 map to C3. You might have a BIOS option to control C6/C7. I've seen several BIOSes that default to only exporting Intel C3 as C2, but do not advertise Intel C6/C7 as C3 until you enable that in the BIOS. http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/datasheets/xeon-e3-1200v3-vol-1-datasheet.pdf How is our support for the newer Cx States introduced in Haswell, which can apparently go as high as C10 For idling, any Intel Cx state should work as long as the BIOS is configured to export it as an ACPI Cx state. -- John Baldwin ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 2014-05-17 08:07, John Baldwin wrote: On 5/12/14, 1:35 PM, Allan Jude wrote: I have this system: hw.model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1220 v3 @ 3.10GHz hw.ncpu: 4 http://ark.intel.com/products/75052 dev.cpu.0.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.0.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.0.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU0 dev.cpu.0.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.0.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.0.freq: 3100 dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 3101/8 3100/8 2900/72713 2800/69558 2600/62669 2400/56794 2300/53935 2100/47673 1900/42370 1800/39795 1600/34136 1500/31729 1300/26432 1137/23128 1100/21994 1000/19851 875/17369 800/15113 700/13223 600/11334 500/9445 400/7556 300/5667 200/3778 100/1889 dev.cpu.0.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.0.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.0.cx_usage: 9.01% 90.98% last 807us dev.cpu.1.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.1.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.1.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU1 dev.cpu.1.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.1.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.1.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.1.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.1.cx_usage: 11.70% 88.29% last 21303us dev.cpu.2.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.2.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.2.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU2 dev.cpu.2.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.2.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.2.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.2.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.2.cx_usage: 15.17% 84.82% last 22987us dev.cpu.3.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.3.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.3.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU3 dev.cpu.3.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.3.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.3.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.3.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.3.cx_usage: 11.74% 88.25% last 6073us According to the Intel specs (Page 11), this processor supports C1, C1E, C3, C6 and C7 The above sysctl dump shows only C1 and C2. I wonder if the C2 is actually C3 Yes, ACPI C states != CPU C states. Often C6/C7 map to C3. You might have a BIOS option to control C6/C7. I've seen several BIOSes that default to only exporting Intel C3 as C2, but do not advertise Intel C6/C7 as C3 until you enable that in the BIOS. http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/datasheets/xeon-e3-1200v3-vol-1-datasheet.pdf How is our support for the newer Cx States introduced in Haswell, which can apparently go as high as C10 For idling, any Intel Cx state should work as long as the BIOS is configured to export it as an ACPI Cx state. Yes, using the intel-pcm tool from ports that Adrian suggested allowed me to check and confirm that when ACPI C3 is being used, the CPU is going to C7 on cores and C6 for the entire package, as well as giving detailed statistics The only thing that I noticed is that the cx_usage stats do not get updated under 100% cpu load (when the CPU never leaves C0) This can be confusing when it suggests that the core is spending 50% of its time in C3 when it is in fact not, but I am not familiar with this part of the system to know if that is something that i sour fault or ACPIs, and if it is fixable. Just reporting my observations ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Did you set cx_lowest on hw.acpi.cpu ? -a On 12 May 2014 20:07, Allan Jude free...@allanjude.com wrote: Before and after cx_lowest=c8 on an E5-2620v2 before: # pcm.x 1 Intel(r) Performance Counter Monitor V2.6 (2013-11-04 13:43:31 +0100 ID=db05e43) Copyright (c) 2009-2013 Intel Corporation Number of physical cores: 12 Number of logical cores: 24 Threads (logical cores) per physical core: 2 Num sockets: 2 Core PMU (perfmon) version: 3 Number of core PMU generic (programmable) counters: 4 Width of generic (programmable) counters: 48 bits Number of core PMU fixed counters: 3 Width of fixed counters: 48 bits Nominal core frequency: 21 Hz Package thermal spec power: 80 Watt; Package minimum power: 51 Watt; Package maximum power: 110 Watt; ERROR: QPI LL monitoring device (0:127:8:2) is missing. The QPI statistics will be incomplete or missing. ERROR: QPI LL monitoring device (0:127:9:2) is missing. The QPI statistics will be incomplete or missing. Socket 0: 1 memory controllers detected with total number of 4 channels. 0 QPI ports detected. ERROR: QPI LL monitoring device (0:255:8:2) is missing. The QPI statistics will be incomplete or missing. ERROR: QPI LL monitoring device (0:255:9:2) is missing. The QPI statistics will be incomplete or missing. Socket 1: 1 memory controllers detected with total number of 4 channels. 0 QPI ports detected. Max QPI link speed: 14.4 GBytes/second (7.2 GT/second) Detected Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v2 @ 2.10GHz Intel(r) microarchitecture codename Ivy Bridge-EP/EN/EX/Ivytown EXEC : instructions per nominal CPU cycle IPC : instructions per CPU cycle FREQ : relation to nominal CPU frequency='unhalted clock ticks'/'invariant timer ticks' (includes Intel Turbo Boost) AFREQ : relation to nominal CPU frequency while in active state (not in power-saving C state)='unhalted clock ticks'/'invariant timer ticks while in C0-state' (includes Intel Turbo Boost) L3MISS: L3 cache misses L2MISS: L2 cache misses (including other core's L2 cache *hits*) L3HIT : L3 cache hit ratio (0.00-1.00) L2HIT : L2 cache hit ratio (0.00-1.00) L3CLK : ratio of CPU cycles lost due to L3 cache misses (0.00-1.00), in some cases could be 1.0 due to a higher memory latency L2CLK : ratio of CPU cycles lost due to missing L2 cache but still hitting L3 cache (0.00-1.00) READ : bytes read from memory controller (in GBytes) WRITE : bytes written to memory controller (in GBytes) TEMP : Temperature reading in 1 degree Celsius relative to the TjMax temperature (thermal headroom): 0 corresponds to the max temperature Core (SKT) | EXEC | IPC | FREQ | AFREQ | L3MISS | L2MISS | L3HIT | L2HIT | L3CLK | L2CLK | READ | WRITE | TEMP 00 0.06 1.02 0.060.992451 K 3421 K0.28 0.850.360.03 N/A N/A 56 10 0.03 1.07 0.030.99 649 K 1331 K0.51 0.930.180.04 N/A N/A 56 20 0.06 1.27 0.050.991020 K 1738 K0.41 0.920.190.03 N/A N/A 47 30 0.05 1.20 0.040.981057 K 2256 K0.53 0.870.200.05 N/A N/A 47 40 0.06 1.28 0.050.991115 K 1942 K0.43 0.910.200.03 N/A N/A 56 50 0.08 1.31 0.060.991046 K 1932 K0.46 0.940.150.03 N/A N/A 56 60 0.06 1.27 0.050.991167 K 1866 K0.37 0.920.200.02 N/A N/A 53 70 0.12 1.45 0.090.991256 K 2263 K0.45 0.950.120.02 N/A N/A 53 80 0.05 1.05 0.050.982372 K 3072 K0.23 0.870.400.02 N/A N/A 53 90 0.03 1.19 0.030.94 968 K 1521 K0.36 0.480.290.04 N/A N/A 53 100 0.09 1.27 0.070.991773 K 3184 K0.44 0.890.210.03 N/A N/A 52 110 0.14 1.33 0.100.991745 K 2808 K0.38 0.960.140.02 N/A N/A 52 121 0.04 1.21 0.030.981116 K 1867 K0.40 0.690.280.04 N/A N/A 49 131 0.09 1.24 0.070.992248 K 3901 K0.42 0.810.270.04 N/A N/A 49 141 0.10 1.35 0.070.981668 K 2603 K0.36 0.920.200.02 N/A N/A 49 151 0.05 1.26 0.040.991435 K 2286 K0.37 0.680.330.04 N/A N/A 49 161 0.11 1.29 0.080.991887 K 3232 K0.42 0.920.190.03 N/A N/A 44 171 0.06 1.28 0.050.99 966 K 1626 K0.41 0.930.180.02 N/A N/A 44 181 0.07 1.30 0.050.991040 K 1870 K0.44 0.920.180.03 N/A N/A 47 191 0.12 1.30 0.090.991973 K 3133 K0.37 0.93
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 2014-05-13 02:06, Adrian Chadd wrote: Did you set cx_lowest on hw.acpi.cpu ? -a On 12 May 2014 20:07, Allan Jude free...@allanjude.com wrote: Before and after cx_lowest=c8 on an E5-2620v2 before: # pcm.x 1 Intel(r) Performance Counter Monitor V2.6 (2013-11-04 13:43:31 +0100 ID=db05e43) Copyright (c) 2009-2013 Intel Corporation Number of physical cores: 12 Number of logical cores: 24 Threads (logical cores) per physical core: 2 Num sockets: 2 Core PMU (perfmon) version: 3 Number of core PMU generic (programmable) counters: 4 Width of generic (programmable) counters: 48 bits Number of core PMU fixed counters: 3 Width of fixed counters: 48 bits Nominal core frequency: 21 Hz Package thermal spec power: 80 Watt; Package minimum power: 51 Watt; Package maximum power: 110 Watt; ERROR: QPI LL monitoring device (0:127:8:2) is missing. The QPI statistics will be incomplete or missing. ERROR: QPI LL monitoring device (0:127:9:2) is missing. The QPI statistics will be incomplete or missing. Socket 0: 1 memory controllers detected with total number of 4 channels. 0 QPI ports detected. ERROR: QPI LL monitoring device (0:255:8:2) is missing. The QPI statistics will be incomplete or missing. ERROR: QPI LL monitoring device (0:255:9:2) is missing. The QPI statistics will be incomplete or missing. Socket 1: 1 memory controllers detected with total number of 4 channels. 0 QPI ports detected. Max QPI link speed: 14.4 GBytes/second (7.2 GT/second) Detected Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v2 @ 2.10GHz Intel(r) microarchitecture codename Ivy Bridge-EP/EN/EX/Ivytown EXEC : instructions per nominal CPU cycle IPC : instructions per CPU cycle FREQ : relation to nominal CPU frequency='unhalted clock ticks'/'invariant timer ticks' (includes Intel Turbo Boost) AFREQ : relation to nominal CPU frequency while in active state (not in power-saving C state)='unhalted clock ticks'/'invariant timer ticks while in C0-state' (includes Intel Turbo Boost) L3MISS: L3 cache misses L2MISS: L2 cache misses (including other core's L2 cache *hits*) L3HIT : L3 cache hit ratio (0.00-1.00) L2HIT : L2 cache hit ratio (0.00-1.00) L3CLK : ratio of CPU cycles lost due to L3 cache misses (0.00-1.00), in some cases could be 1.0 due to a higher memory latency L2CLK : ratio of CPU cycles lost due to missing L2 cache but still hitting L3 cache (0.00-1.00) READ : bytes read from memory controller (in GBytes) WRITE : bytes written to memory controller (in GBytes) TEMP : Temperature reading in 1 degree Celsius relative to the TjMax temperature (thermal headroom): 0 corresponds to the max temperature Core (SKT) | EXEC | IPC | FREQ | AFREQ | L3MISS | L2MISS | L3HIT | L2HIT | L3CLK | L2CLK | READ | WRITE | TEMP 00 0.06 1.02 0.060.992451 K 3421 K0.28 0.850.360.03 N/A N/A 56 10 0.03 1.07 0.030.99 649 K 1331 K0.51 0.930.180.04 N/A N/A 56 20 0.06 1.27 0.050.991020 K 1738 K0.41 0.920.190.03 N/A N/A 47 30 0.05 1.20 0.040.981057 K 2256 K0.53 0.870.20 0.05 N/A N/A 47 40 0.06 1.28 0.050.99 1115 K 1942 K0.43 0.910.200.03 N/A N/A 56 50 0.08 1.31 0.060.991046 K 1932 K 0.46 0.940.150.03 N/A N/A 56 60 0.06 1.27 0.050.991167 K 1866 K0.37 0.920.200.02 N/A N/A 53 70 0.12 1.45 0.090.991256 K 2263 K0.45 0.950.120.02 N/A N/A 53 80 0.05 1.05 0.050.982372 K 3072 K0.23 0.870.40 0.02 N/A N/A 53 90 0.03 1.19 0.030.94 968 K 1521 K0.36 0.480.290.04 N/A N/A 53 100 0.09 1.27 0.070.991773 K 3184 K0.44 0.890.210.03 N/A N/A 52 110 0.14 1.33 0.100.991745 K 2808 K0.38 0.960.140.02 N/A N/A 52 121 0.04 1.21 0.030.981116 K 1867 K0.40 0.690.280.04 N/A N/A 49 131 0.09 1.24 0.070.992248 K 3901 K0.42 0.810.27 0.04 N/A N/A 49 141 0.10 1.35 0.070.98 1668 K 2603 K0.36 0.920.200.02 N/A N/A 49 151 0.05 1.26 0.040.991435 K 2286 K 0.37 0.680.330.04 N/A N/A 49 161 0.11 1.29 0.080.991887 K 3232 K0.42 0.920.190.03 N/A N/A 44 171 0.06 1.28 0.050.99 966 K 1626 K0.41 0.930.180.02 N/A N/A 44 181 0.07 1.30 0.050.991040 K 1870 K0.44 0.920.18 0.03 N/A N/A 47 191 0.12 1.30 0.090.99 1973 K 3133 K0.37 0.930.180.02 N/A N/A 47 201 0.05 1.33 0.040.99 898 K 1531 K 0.41 0.910.190.03
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
I have this system: hw.model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1220 v3 @ 3.10GHz hw.ncpu: 4 http://ark.intel.com/products/75052 dev.cpu.0.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.0.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.0.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU0 dev.cpu.0.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.0.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.0.freq: 3100 dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 3101/8 3100/8 2900/72713 2800/69558 2600/62669 2400/56794 2300/53935 2100/47673 1900/42370 1800/39795 1600/34136 1500/31729 1300/26432 1137/23128 1100/21994 1000/19851 875/17369 800/15113 700/13223 600/11334 500/9445 400/7556 300/5667 200/3778 100/1889 dev.cpu.0.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.0.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.0.cx_usage: 9.01% 90.98% last 807us dev.cpu.1.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.1.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.1.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU1 dev.cpu.1.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.1.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.1.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.1.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.1.cx_usage: 11.70% 88.29% last 21303us dev.cpu.2.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.2.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.2.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU2 dev.cpu.2.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.2.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.2.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.2.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.2.cx_usage: 15.17% 84.82% last 22987us dev.cpu.3.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.3.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.3.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU3 dev.cpu.3.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.3.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.3.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.3.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.3.cx_usage: 11.74% 88.25% last 6073us According to the Intel specs (Page 11), this processor supports C1, C1E, C3, C6 and C7 The above sysctl dump shows only C1 and C2. I wonder if the C2 is actually C3 http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/datasheets/xeon-e3-1200v3-vol-1-datasheet.pdf How is our support for the newer Cx States introduced in Haswell, which can apparently go as high as C10 ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 12 May 2014 10:35, Allan Jude free...@allanjude.com wrote: I have this system: hw.model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1220 v3 @ 3.10GHz hw.ncpu: 4 http://ark.intel.com/products/75052 dev.cpu.0.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.0.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.0.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU0 dev.cpu.0.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.0.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.0.freq: 3100 dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 3101/8 3100/8 2900/72713 2800/69558 2600/62669 2400/56794 2300/53935 2100/47673 1900/42370 1800/39795 1600/34136 1500/31729 1300/26432 1137/23128 1100/21994 1000/19851 875/17369 800/15113 700/13223 600/11334 500/9445 400/7556 300/5667 200/3778 100/1889 dev.cpu.0.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.0.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.0.cx_usage: 9.01% 90.98% last 807us dev.cpu.1.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.1.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.1.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU1 dev.cpu.1.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.1.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.1.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.1.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.1.cx_usage: 11.70% 88.29% last 21303us dev.cpu.2.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.2.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.2.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU2 dev.cpu.2.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.2.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.2.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.2.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.2.cx_usage: 15.17% 84.82% last 22987us dev.cpu.3.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.3.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.3.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU3 dev.cpu.3.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.3.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.3.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.3.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.3.cx_usage: 11.74% 88.25% last 6073us So ACPI is exposing C1 and C2 only. According to the Intel specs (Page 11), this processor supports C1, C1E, C3, C6 and C7 The above sysctl dump shows only C1 and C2. I wonder if the C2 is actually C3 http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/datasheets/xeon-e3-1200v3-vol-1-datasheet.pdf It'd say C2/3/xxx in that case. Chances are you'll end up seeing it fall into deeper sleep states. Try installing intel-pcm; kldload cpuctl; run pcm.x 1 . See if it's entering lower CPU states. How is our support for the newer Cx States introduced in Haswell, which can apparently go as high as C10 I don't know if we get those exposed via ACPI. I know there's a bunch of cute things we could be doing with MWAIT that we aren't, but we certainly should be drifting into lower sleep states. Just run intel-pcm and see. Thanks, -a ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 2014-05-12 14:25, Adrian Chadd wrote: On 12 May 2014 10:35, Allan Jude free...@allanjude.com wrote: I have this system: hw.model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1220 v3 @ 3.10GHz hw.ncpu: 4 http://ark.intel.com/products/75052 dev.cpu.0.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.0.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.0.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU0 dev.cpu.0.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.0.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.0.freq: 3100 dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 3101/8 3100/8 2900/72713 2800/69558 2600/62669 2400/56794 2300/53935 2100/47673 1900/42370 1800/39795 1600/34136 1500/31729 1300/26432 1137/23128 1100/21994 1000/19851 875/17369 800/15113 700/13223 600/11334 500/9445 400/7556 300/5667 200/3778 100/1889 dev.cpu.0.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.0.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.0.cx_usage: 9.01% 90.98% last 807us dev.cpu.1.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.1.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.1.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU1 dev.cpu.1.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.1.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.1.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.1.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.1.cx_usage: 11.70% 88.29% last 21303us dev.cpu.2.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.2.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.2.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU2 dev.cpu.2.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.2.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.2.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.2.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.2.cx_usage: 15.17% 84.82% last 22987us dev.cpu.3.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.3.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.3.%location: handle=\_PR_.CPU3 dev.cpu.3.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.3.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.3.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/148 dev.cpu.3.cx_lowest: C8 dev.cpu.3.cx_usage: 11.74% 88.25% last 6073us So ACPI is exposing C1 and C2 only. According to the Intel specs (Page 11), this processor supports C1, C1E, C3, C6 and C7 The above sysctl dump shows only C1 and C2. I wonder if the C2 is actually C3 http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/datasheets/xeon-e3-1200v3-vol-1-datasheet.pdf It'd say C2/3/xxx in that case. Chances are you'll end up seeing it fall into deeper sleep states. Try installing intel-pcm; kldload cpuctl; run pcm.x 1 . See if it's entering lower CPU states. How is our support for the newer Cx States introduced in Haswell, which can apparently go as high as C10 I don't know if we get those exposed via ACPI. I know there's a bunch of cute things we could be doing with MWAIT that we aren't, but we certainly should be drifting into lower sleep states. Just run intel-pcm and see. Thanks, -a stock configuration: # pcm.x 10 Intel(r) Performance Counter Monitor V2.6 (2013-11-04 13:43:31 +0100 ID=db05e43) Copyright (c) 2009-2013 Intel Corporation Number of physical cores: 4 Number of logical cores: 4 Threads (logical cores) per physical core: 1 Num sockets: 1 Core PMU (perfmon) version: 3 Number of core PMU generic (programmable) counters: 8 Width of generic (programmable) counters: 48 bits Number of core PMU fixed counters: 3 Width of fixed counters: 48 bits Nominal core frequency: 31 Hz Package thermal spec power: 80 Watt; Package minimum power: 0 Watt; Package maximum power: 0 Watt; Detected Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1220 v3 @ 3.10GHz Intel(r) microarchitecture codename Haswell EXEC : instructions per nominal CPU cycle IPC : instructions per CPU cycle FREQ : relation to nominal CPU frequency='unhalted clock ticks'/'invariant timer ticks' (includes Intel Turbo Boost) AFREQ : relation to nominal CPU frequency while in active state (not in power-saving C state)='unhalted clock ticks'/'invariant timer ticks while in C0-state' (includes Intel Turbo Boost) L3MISS: L3 cache misses L2MISS: L2 cache misses (including other core's L2 cache *hits*) L3HIT : L3 cache hit ratio (0.00-1.00) L2HIT : L2 cache hit ratio (0.00-1.00) L3CLK : ratio of CPU cycles lost due to L3 cache misses (0.00-1.00), in some cases could be 1.0 due to a higher memory latency L2CLK : ratio of CPU cycles lost due to missing L2 cache but still hitting L3 cache (0.00-1.00) READ : bytes read from memory controller (in GBytes) WRITE : bytes written to memory controller (in GBytes) TEMP : Temperature reading in 1 degree Celsius relative to the TjMax temperature (thermal headroom): 0 corresponds to the max temperature Core (SKT) | EXEC | IPC | FREQ | AFREQ | L3MISS | L2MISS | L3HIT | L2HIT | L3CLK | L2CLK | READ | WRITE | TEMP 00 0.00 0.74 0.000.76 39 K120 K0.67 0.660.130.09 N/A N/A 74 10 0.00 0.72 0.000.75 17 K 80 K0.79 0.710.070.10 N/A N/A 76 20 0.00 0.62 0.000.618037 33 K0.76 0.580.080.08 N/A N/A 76 30 0.00 0.72 0.000.76 18 K 98 K0.81 0.700.070.10 N/A N/A 76 --- SKT0 0.00 0.72 0.000.74 83 K332 K0.75
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 2014-05-12 14:25, Adrian Chadd wrote: Just run intel-pcm and see. Thanks, -a Not sure if this is expected or not, but on Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570 CPU @ 3.40GHz all of the pcm.x tools just hang (cpu state: usem) ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 05/12/2014 22:12, Allan Jude wrote: On 2014-05-12 14:25, Adrian Chadd wrote: Just run intel-pcm and see. Thanks, -a Not sure if this is expected or not, but on Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570 CPU @ 3.40GHz all of the pcm.x tools just hang (cpu state: usem) ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org Found the problem The first time I tried to run pcm.x it crashed (because I didn't have cpuctl kldloaded). On my laptop this gave a friendly error, but on the desktop i5 it just signal 8'd. Anyway, removing the stale lock file, /tmp/SEMDIntel_PCM_inst_lock resolved it #pcm.x 10 Intel(r) Performance Counter Monitor V2.6 (2013-11-04 13:43:31 +0100 ID=db05e43) Copyright (c) 2009-2013 Intel Corporation Number of physical cores: 4 Number of logical cores: 4 Threads (logical cores) per physical core: 1 Num sockets: 1 Core PMU (perfmon) version: 3 Number of core PMU generic (programmable) counters: 8 Width of generic (programmable) counters: 48 bits Number of core PMU fixed counters: 3 Width of fixed counters: 48 bits Nominal core frequency: 34 Hz Package thermal spec power: 77 Watt; Package minimum power: 60 Watt; Package maximum power: 0 Watt; Detected Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570 CPU @ 3.40GHz Intel(r) microarchitecture codename Ivy Bridge EXEC : instructions per nominal CPU cycle IPC : instructions per CPU cycle FREQ : relation to nominal CPU frequency='unhalted clock ticks'/'invariant timer ticks' (includes Intel Turbo Boost) AFREQ : relation to nominal CPU frequency while in active state (not in power-saving C state)='unhalted clock ticks'/'invariant timer ticks while in C0-state' (includes Intel Turbo Boost) L3MISS: L3 cache misses L2MISS: L2 cache misses (including other core's L2 cache *hits*) L3HIT : L3 cache hit ratio (0.00-1.00) L2HIT : L2 cache hit ratio (0.00-1.00) L3CLK : ratio of CPU cycles lost due to L3 cache misses (0.00-1.00), in some cases could be 1.0 due to a higher memory latency L2CLK : ratio of CPU cycles lost due to missing L2 cache but still hitting L3 cache (0.00-1.00) READ : bytes read from memory controller (in GBytes) WRITE : bytes written to memory controller (in GBytes) TEMP : Temperature reading in 1 degree Celsius relative to the TjMax temperature (thermal headroom): 0 corresponds to the max temperature Core (SKT) | EXEC | IPC | FREQ | AFREQ | L3MISS | L2MISS | L3HIT | L2HIT | L3CLK | L2CLK | READ | WRITE | TEMP 00 0.00 0.21 0.020.491532 K 2978 K0.49 0.010.430.08 N/A N/A 73 10 0.00 0.29 0.000.98 119 K208 K0.43 0.120.300.05 N/A N/A 73 20 0.00 0.29 0.001.00 117 K169 K0.31 0.120.330.03 N/A N/A 73 30 0.00 0.39 0.000.93 131 K162 K0.19 0.180.320.02 N/A N/A 73 --- SKT0 0.00 0.24 0.010.561900 K 3518 K0.46 0.030.400.070.190.02 73 --- TOTAL * 0.00 0.24 0.010.561900 K 3518 K0.46 0.030.400.070.190.02 N/A Instructions retired: 200 M ; Active cycles: 850 M ; Time (TSC): 34 Gticks ; C0 (active,non-halted) core residency: 1.12 % C1 core residency: 1.76 %; C3 core residency: 0.10 %; C6 core residency: 97.02 %; C7 core residency: 0.00 %; C2 package residency: 43.01 %; C3 package residency: 0.13 %; C6 package residency: 41.23 %; C7 package residency: 0.00 %; PHYSICAL CORE IPC : 0.24 = corresponds to 5.89 % utilization for cores in active state Instructions per nominal CPU cycle: 0.00 = corresponds to 0.04 % core utilization over time interval -- -- SKT0 package consumed 69.21 Joules -- TOTAL:69.21 Joules ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 05/12/2014 22:09, Allan Jude wrote: Will try to grab results from a few more machines ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org From my laptop: #pcm.x 1 Intel(r) Performance Counter Monitor V2.6 (2013-11-04 13:43:31 +0100 ID=db05e43) Copyright (c) 2009-2013 Intel Corporation Number of physical cores: 2 Number of logical cores: 4 Threads (logical cores) per physical core: 2 Num sockets: 1 Core PMU (perfmon) version: 3 Number of core PMU generic (programmable) counters: 4 Width of generic (programmable) counters: 48 bits Number of core PMU fixed counters: 3 Width of fixed counters: 48 bits Nominal core frequency: 26 Hz Package thermal spec power: 35 Watt; Package minimum power: 24 Watt; Package maximum power: 0 Watt; Detected Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3320M CPU @ 2.60GHz Intel(r) microarchitecture codename Ivy Bridge EXEC : instructions per nominal CPU cycle IPC : instructions per CPU cycle FREQ : relation to nominal CPU frequency='unhalted clock ticks'/'invariant timer ticks' (includes Intel Turbo Boost) AFREQ : relation to nominal CPU frequency while in active state (not in power-saving C state)='unhalted clock ticks'/'invariant timer ticks while in C0-state' (includes Intel Turbo Boost) L3MISS: L3 cache misses L2MISS: L2 cache misses (including other core's L2 cache *hits*) L3HIT : L3 cache hit ratio (0.00-1.00) L2HIT : L2 cache hit ratio (0.00-1.00) L3CLK : ratio of CPU cycles lost due to L3 cache misses (0.00-1.00), in some cases could be 1.0 due to a higher memory latency L2CLK : ratio of CPU cycles lost due to missing L2 cache but still hitting L3 cache (0.00-1.00) READ : bytes read from memory controller (in GBytes) WRITE : bytes written to memory controller (in GBytes) TEMP : Temperature reading in 1 degree Celsius relative to the TjMax temperature (thermal headroom): 0 corresponds to the max temperature Core (SKT) | EXEC | IPC | FREQ | AFREQ | L3MISS | L2MISS | L3HIT | L2HIT | L3CLK | L2CLK | READ | WRITE | TEMP 00 0.00 0.84 0.000.46 295 K564 K0.48 0.210.550.11 N/A N/A 60 10 0.00 0.77 0.000.46 166 K279 K0.40 0.240.620.10 N/A N/A 60 20 0.00 0.75 0.000.46 138 K200 K0.31 0.290.460.05 N/A N/A 60 30 0.00 0.78 0.000.46 170 K249 K0.32 0.280.500.05 N/A N/A 60 --- SKT0 0.00 0.80 0.000.46 770 K 1294 K0.40 0.240.530.080.110.04 60 --- TOTAL * 0.00 0.80 0.000.46 770 K 1294 K0.40 0.240.530.080.110.04 N/A Instructions retired: 208 M ; Active cycles: 261 M ; Time (TSC): 25 Gticks ; C0 (active,non-halted) core residency: 0.55 % C1 core residency: 4.44 %; C3 core residency: 0.16 %; C6 core residency: 94.85 %; C7 core residency: 0.00 %; C2 package residency: 4.26 %; C3 package residency: 0.10 %; C6 package residency: 88.28 %; C7 package residency: 0.00 %; PHYSICAL CORE IPC : 1.60 = corresponds to 39.89 % utilization for cores in active state Instructions per nominal CPU cycle: 0.00 = corresponds to 0.10 % core utilization over time interval -- -- SKT0 package consumed 23.02 Joules -- TOTAL:23.02 Joules ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Before and after cx_lowest=c8 on an E5-2620v2 before: # pcm.x 1 Intel(r) Performance Counter Monitor V2.6 (2013-11-04 13:43:31 +0100 ID=db05e43) Copyright (c) 2009-2013 Intel Corporation Number of physical cores: 12 Number of logical cores: 24 Threads (logical cores) per physical core: 2 Num sockets: 2 Core PMU (perfmon) version: 3 Number of core PMU generic (programmable) counters: 4 Width of generic (programmable) counters: 48 bits Number of core PMU fixed counters: 3 Width of fixed counters: 48 bits Nominal core frequency: 21 Hz Package thermal spec power: 80 Watt; Package minimum power: 51 Watt; Package maximum power: 110 Watt; ERROR: QPI LL monitoring device (0:127:8:2) is missing. The QPI statistics will be incomplete or missing. ERROR: QPI LL monitoring device (0:127:9:2) is missing. The QPI statistics will be incomplete or missing. Socket 0: 1 memory controllers detected with total number of 4 channels. 0 QPI ports detected. ERROR: QPI LL monitoring device (0:255:8:2) is missing. The QPI statistics will be incomplete or missing. ERROR: QPI LL monitoring device (0:255:9:2) is missing. The QPI statistics will be incomplete or missing. Socket 1: 1 memory controllers detected with total number of 4 channels. 0 QPI ports detected. Max QPI link speed: 14.4 GBytes/second (7.2 GT/second) Detected Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v2 @ 2.10GHz Intel(r) microarchitecture codename Ivy Bridge-EP/EN/EX/Ivytown EXEC : instructions per nominal CPU cycle IPC : instructions per CPU cycle FREQ : relation to nominal CPU frequency='unhalted clock ticks'/'invariant timer ticks' (includes Intel Turbo Boost) AFREQ : relation to nominal CPU frequency while in active state (not in power-saving C state)='unhalted clock ticks'/'invariant timer ticks while in C0-state' (includes Intel Turbo Boost) L3MISS: L3 cache misses L2MISS: L2 cache misses (including other core's L2 cache *hits*) L3HIT : L3 cache hit ratio (0.00-1.00) L2HIT : L2 cache hit ratio (0.00-1.00) L3CLK : ratio of CPU cycles lost due to L3 cache misses (0.00-1.00), in some cases could be 1.0 due to a higher memory latency L2CLK : ratio of CPU cycles lost due to missing L2 cache but still hitting L3 cache (0.00-1.00) READ : bytes read from memory controller (in GBytes) WRITE : bytes written to memory controller (in GBytes) TEMP : Temperature reading in 1 degree Celsius relative to the TjMax temperature (thermal headroom): 0 corresponds to the max temperature Core (SKT) | EXEC | IPC | FREQ | AFREQ | L3MISS | L2MISS | L3HIT | L2HIT | L3CLK | L2CLK | READ | WRITE | TEMP 00 0.06 1.02 0.060.992451 K 3421 K0.28 0.850.360.03 N/A N/A 56 10 0.03 1.07 0.030.99 649 K 1331 K0.51 0.930.180.04 N/A N/A 56 20 0.06 1.27 0.050.991020 K 1738 K0.41 0.920.190.03 N/A N/A 47 30 0.05 1.20 0.040.981057 K 2256 K0.53 0.870.200.05 N/A N/A 47 40 0.06 1.28 0.050.991115 K 1942 K0.43 0.910.200.03 N/A N/A 56 50 0.08 1.31 0.060.991046 K 1932 K0.46 0.940.150.03 N/A N/A 56 60 0.06 1.27 0.050.991167 K 1866 K0.37 0.920.200.02 N/A N/A 53 70 0.12 1.45 0.090.991256 K 2263 K0.45 0.950.120.02 N/A N/A 53 80 0.05 1.05 0.050.982372 K 3072 K0.23 0.870.400.02 N/A N/A 53 90 0.03 1.19 0.030.94 968 K 1521 K0.36 0.480.290.04 N/A N/A 53 100 0.09 1.27 0.070.991773 K 3184 K0.44 0.890.210.03 N/A N/A 52 110 0.14 1.33 0.100.991745 K 2808 K0.38 0.960.140.02 N/A N/A 52 121 0.04 1.21 0.030.981116 K 1867 K0.40 0.690.280.04 N/A N/A 49 131 0.09 1.24 0.070.992248 K 3901 K0.42 0.810.270.04 N/A N/A 49 141 0.10 1.35 0.070.981668 K 2603 K0.36 0.920.200.02 N/A N/A 49 151 0.05 1.26 0.040.991435 K 2286 K0.37 0.680.330.04 N/A N/A 49 161 0.11 1.29 0.080.991887 K 3232 K0.42 0.920.190.03 N/A N/A 44 171 0.06 1.28 0.050.99 966 K 1626 K0.41 0.930.180.02 N/A N/A 44 181 0.07 1.30 0.050.991040 K 1870 K0.44 0.920.180.03 N/A N/A 47 191 0.12 1.30 0.090.991973 K 3133 K0.37 0.930.180.02 N/A N/A 47 201 0.05 1.33 0.040.99 898 K 1531 K0.41 0.910.190.03 N/A N/A 48 211 0.06 1.18 0.050.971140 K
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
El día Wednesday, May 07, 2014 a las 12:14:16PM +0800, Jia-Shiun Li escribió: On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 1:05 AM, Matthias Apitz g...@unixarea.de wrote: # dmesg ... CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 900MHz (900.11-MHz 686-class CPU) Origin = GenuineIntel Id = 0x6d8 Family = 0x6 Model = 0xd Stepping = 8 Features=0xafe9fbffFPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,TM,PBE AMD Features=0x10NX real memory = 2147483648 (2048 MB) avail memory = 2076614656 (1980 MB) The Celeron M CPU is a Pentium-M without EIST. Otherwise you'd see EST bit set in Features2. See https://wiki.freebsd.org/AsusEee. Guess that's why Asus deliberately underclocked it to 630MHz in the first gen EEE PC 701 - no automatic way available. Don't know if p4tcc or acpi_throttle helps, though. The output on the EeePC (or its battery) is pretty much useless; this is after 2880 secs uptime: $ acpiconf -i0 Design capacity:4400 mAh Last full capacity: 100 mAh Technology: secondary (rechargeable) Design voltage: 8400 mV Capacity (warn):20 mAh Capacity (low): 10 mAh Low/warn granularity: 44 mAh Warn/full granularity: 44 mAh Model number: 900 Serial number: Type: LION OEM info: ASUS State: discharging Remaining capacity: 60% Remaining time: unknown Present rate: unknown Present voltage:7243 mV There is no indication about 'Present rate' and 'Remaining time'. Over all, with external USB UMTS modem active and KDE4 up, the battery lasts only a bit more than one hour. The label on the bat says 6600 mAh, while acpiconf reads 4400 mAh. Due to the lack of 'Present rate' it's not possible to calculate what the bat gives at all. I will try to build something to attach a voltage meter between the bat and the laptop. matthias -- Matthias Apitz | /\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign: E-mail: g...@unixarea.de | \ / - No HTML/RTF in E-mail WWW: http://www.unixarea.de/ | X- No proprietary attachments phone: +49-170-4527211 | / \ - Respect for open standards | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Ribbon_Campaign ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Hello, I wanted to implement the power saving hints we discussed in my tiny EeePC 900, but it says: root@tiny-r255948:~ # uname -a FreeBSD tiny-r255948 10.0-ALPHA4 FreeBSD 10.0-ALPHA4 #1: Fri Oct 18 12:10:57 CEST 2013 g...@aurora.sisis.de:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386 root@tiny-r255948:~ # /etc/rc.d/powerd start Starting powerd. powerd: no cpufreq(4) support -- aborting: No such file or directory /etc/rc.d/powerd: WARNING: failed to start powerd root@tiny-r255948:~ # kldload cpufreq kldload: can't load cpufreq: File exists Any ideas? matthias -- Sent from my FreeBSD netbook Matthias Apitz, g...@unixarea.de, http://www.unixarea.de/ f: +49-170-4527211 UNIX since V7 on PDP-11, UNIX on mainframe since ESER 1055 (IBM /370) UNIX on x86 since SVR4.2 UnixWare 2.1.2, FreeBSD since 2.2.5 ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 2014-05-06 12:38, Matthias Apitz wrote: Hello, I wanted to implement the power saving hints we discussed in my tiny EeePC 900, but it says: root@tiny-r255948:~ # uname -a FreeBSD tiny-r255948 10.0-ALPHA4 FreeBSD 10.0-ALPHA4 #1: Fri Oct 18 12:10:57 CEST 2013 g...@aurora.sisis.de:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386 root@tiny-r255948:~ # /etc/rc.d/powerd start Starting powerd. powerd: no cpufreq(4) support -- aborting: No such file or directory /etc/rc.d/powerd: WARNING: failed to start powerd root@tiny-r255948:~ # kldload cpufreq kldload: can't load cpufreq: File exists Any ideas? matthias Does it have an Atom processor? I don't know that the older atoms have EIST (speed step), I don't think you can change the CPU frequency at all. -- Allan Jude signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
El día Tuesday, May 06, 2014 a las 01:00:21PM -0400, Allan Jude escribió: EeePC 900, but it says: root@tiny-r255948:~ # uname -a FreeBSD tiny-r255948 10.0-ALPHA4 FreeBSD 10.0-ALPHA4 #1: Fri Oct 18 12:10:57 CEST 2013 g...@aurora.sisis.de:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386 root@tiny-r255948:~ # /etc/rc.d/powerd start Starting powerd. powerd: no cpufreq(4) support -- aborting: No such file or directory /etc/rc.d/powerd: WARNING: failed to start powerd root@tiny-r255948:~ # kldload cpufreq kldload: can't load cpufreq: File exists Any ideas? matthias Does it have an Atom processor? I don't know that the older atoms have EIST (speed step), I don't think you can change the CPU frequency at all. # dmesg ... CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 900MHz (900.11-MHz 686-class CPU) Origin = GenuineIntel Id = 0x6d8 Family = 0x6 Model = 0xd Stepping = 8 Features=0xafe9fbffFPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,TM,PBE AMD Features=0x10NX real memory = 2147483648 (2048 MB) avail memory = 2076614656 (1980 MB) matthias -- Sent from my FreeBSD netbook Matthias Apitz, g...@unixarea.de, http://www.unixarea.de/ f: +49-170-4527211 UNIX since V7 on PDP-11, UNIX on mainframe since ESER 1055 (IBM /370) UNIX on x86 since SVR4.2 UnixWare 2.1.2, FreeBSD since 2.2.5 ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 6 May 2014 09:38, Matthias Apitz g...@unixarea.de wrote: Hello, I wanted to implement the power saving hints we discussed in my tiny EeePC 900, but it says: root@tiny-r255948:~ # uname -a FreeBSD tiny-r255948 10.0-ALPHA4 FreeBSD 10.0-ALPHA4 #1: Fri Oct 18 12:10:57 CEST 2013 g...@aurora.sisis.de:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386 root@tiny-r255948:~ # /etc/rc.d/powerd start Starting powerd. powerd: no cpufreq(4) support -- aborting: No such file or directory /etc/rc.d/powerd: WARNING: failed to start powerd root@tiny-r255948:~ # kldload cpufreq kldload: can't load cpufreq: File exists Well, what's a bootverbose look like? What's 'sysctl dev.cpu' show? -a ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 1:05 AM, Matthias Apitz g...@unixarea.de wrote: # dmesg ... CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 900MHz (900.11-MHz 686-class CPU) Origin = GenuineIntel Id = 0x6d8 Family = 0x6 Model = 0xd Stepping = 8 Features=0xafe9fbffFPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,TM,PBE AMD Features=0x10NX real memory = 2147483648 (2048 MB) avail memory = 2076614656 (1980 MB) The Celeron M CPU is a Pentium-M without EIST. Otherwise you'd see EST bit set in Features2. See https://wiki.freebsd.org/AsusEee. Guess that's why Asus deliberately underclocked it to 630MHz in the first gen EEE PC 701 - no automatic way available. Don't know if p4tcc or acpi_throttle helps, though. -Jia-Shiun. ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
El día Saturday, May 03, 2014 a las 04:59:48PM -0700, Kevin Oberman escribió: Available is not required. Set it to C8. That guarantees that you will use the lowest available. The correct incantation in rc.conf is Cmax. performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax But, unless you want laggy performance, you will probably also want: hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 in /boot/loader.conf. Low Cx states and TCC/throttling simply don't mix well and TCC is not effective, as mentioned earlier in this thread. In the output of: $ sysctl -a | fgrep dev.cpu.0.freq_ dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 1600/2000 1333/1533 1066/1066 800/600 what does mean the value after the slash .../ ? Thx matthias -- Matthias Apitz | /\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign: E-mail: g...@unixarea.de | \ / - No HTML/RTF in E-mail WWW: http://www.unixarea.de/ | X- No proprietary attachments phone: +49-170-4527211 | / \ - Respect for open standards | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Ribbon_Campaign ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Am 05.05.2014 11:17, schrieb Matthias Apitz: El día Saturday, May 03, 2014 a las 04:59:48PM -0700, Kevin Oberman escribió: Available is not required. Set it to C8. That guarantees that you will use the lowest available. The correct incantation in rc.conf is Cmax. performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax But, unless you want laggy performance, you will probably also want: hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 in /boot/loader.conf. Low Cx states and TCC/throttling simply don't mix well and TCC is not effective, as mentioned earlier in this thread. In the output of: $ sysctl -a | fgrep dev.cpu.0.freq_ dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 1600/2000 1333/1533 1066/1066 800/600 what does mean the value after the slash .../ ? This is the nominal power consumption (TDP) in mW for that level. These numbers correspond to 2W at 1600MHz and 0.6W at 800MHz. Is this an Atom or some other ultra-low power CPU? Regards, STefan ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
El día Monday, May 05, 2014 a las 12:09:02PM +0200, Stefan Esser escribió: In the output of: $ sysctl -a | fgrep dev.cpu.0.freq_ dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 1600/2000 1333/1533 1066/1066 800/600 what does mean the value after the slash .../ ? This is the nominal power consumption (TDP) in mW for that level. These numbers correspond to 2W at 1600MHz and 0.6W at 800MHz. Thanks. Is this an Atom or some other ultra-low power CPU? dmesg shows: ... CPU: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz (1596.22-MHz 686-class CPU) Origin = GenuineIntel Id = 0x106c2 Family = 0x6 Model = 0x1c Stepping = 2 Features=0xbfe9fbffFPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE Features2=0x40c39dSSE3,DTES64,MON,DS_CPL,EST,TM2,SSSE3,xTPR,PDCM,MOVBE AMD Features2=0x1LAHF TSC: P-state invariant, performance statistics real memory = 1073741824 (1024 MB) avail memory = 1004568576 (958 MB) Event timer LAPIC quality 400 ACPI APIC Table: ACRSYS ACRPRDCT FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 2 CPUs FreeBSD/SMP: 1 package(s) x 1 core(s) x 2 HTT threads cpu0 (BSP): APIC ID: 0 cpu1 (AP/HT): APIC ID: 1 ioapic0: Changing APIC ID to 4 ioapic0 Version 2.0 irqs 0-23 on motherboard ... Btw: the values in /etc/rc.conf performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax to which launched process they belong as config values? Thanks matthias -- Matthias Apitz | /\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign: E-mail: g...@unixarea.de | \ / - No HTML/RTF in E-mail WWW: http://www.unixarea.de/ | X- No proprietary attachments phone: +49-170-4527211 | / \ - Respect for open standards | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Ribbon_Campaign ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
El día Monday, May 05, 2014 a las 12:36:08PM +0200, Matthias Apitz escribió: Btw: the values in /etc/rc.conf performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax to which launched process they belong as config values? Forget the question. The values are used by /etc/rc.d/power_profile which is launched when AC goes away or comes back. Maybe we should have a note about this in rc.conf(5) that these values are passed to this script or the names should be changed to power_profile_performance_cx_lowest power_profile_economy_cx_lowest matthias matthias -- Matthias Apitz | /\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign: E-mail: g...@unixarea.de | \ / - No HTML/RTF in E-mail WWW: http://www.unixarea.de/ | X- No proprietary attachments phone: +49-170-4527211 | / \ - Respect for open standards | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Ribbon_Campaign ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Sunday, May 04, 2014 4:40:02 pm Adrian Chadd wrote: Hm, I was hoping for a little more discussion. Mostly around the which older CPUs do we leave this on for? crowd. I have Pentium-M class hardware that I was going to spin up -HEAD on. So I'll go install -HEAD on said older hardware and get a list of what does and doesn't work. I'm totally fine with disabling p4tcc and acpi_throttle if P states for cpu frequency adjustment are available. I just want to ensure that the temperature throttling stuff is going to get automatically engaged (by whichever magical BIOS/ACPI/SMI thing does it) and clock things down if the CPU gets way too hot. The only things that should use throttling are really old machines where ACPI asks the OS to do passive cooling by exposing the TC1 and TC2 constants. (I have an old P4 laptop where this is the case, I think Pentium-M is too new to need this.) If we keep TCC at all, it should not be tied into cpufreq but be a separate thing that only acpi_thermal.c uses. -- John Baldwin ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
El día Saturday, May 03, 2014 a las 04:59:48PM -0700, Kevin Oberman escribió: On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Set it to the lowest available Cx state that you see in dev.cpu.0 . Available is not required. Set it to C8. That guarantees that you will use the lowest available. The correct incantation in rc.conf is Cmax. performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax But, unless you want laggy performance, you will probably also want: hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 in /boot/loader.conf. Low Cx states and TCC/throttling simply don't mix well and TCC is not effective, as mentioned earlier in this thread. Re/ powerd I have in /etc/rc.conf: # powerd powerd_enable=YES powerd_flags=-a max -b adp # performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax (and the additional hint.* in /boot/loader.conf as well). Which process 'performance_cx_lowest' and 'economy_cx_lowest' target exactly as config values? Thx matthias -- Matthias Apitz | /\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign: E-mail: g...@unixarea.de | \ / - No HTML/RTF in E-mail WWW: http://www.unixarea.de/ | X- No proprietary attachments phone: +49-170-4527211 | / \ - Respect for open standards | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Ribbon_Campaign ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 05/03/14 22:29, Adrian Chadd wrote: On 3 May 2014 21:52, Allan Jude free...@allanjude.com wrote: * use cpufreq with some heuristics (like say, only step down to 2/3rd the frequency if idle) - and document why that decision is made (eg on CPU X, measuring Y at idle, power consumption was minimal at frequency=Z.); * make sure the lower frequencies and tcc kick in if a thermal cutoff is reached; * default to using lower Cx states out of the box if they're decided to not be buggy. There are a few CPUs for which lower C states cause problems but modernish hardware (say, nehalem and later) should be fine. According to the wiki, in 9.x and onward there is code that is supposed to detect if the higher Cx states are usable, and not use them if they are not, but I do not know how well this works. I'm not sure. I think those who care / know enough just put relevant bits into /etc/rc.conf and /boot/loader.conf rather than flipping it on by default. I'm kind of tempted to just flip on Cmax by default and teach powerd to not do cpufreq unless there's a thermal issue. Then take a step back and see what happens. Please remember that powerd is not x86-only. Other systems (e.g. PowerPC) use it in conjunction with cpufreq. But seriously, let's just pull tcc from GENERIC. I'll do it next week unless I hear any objections. -Nathan ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 2014-05-04 10:28, Matthias Apitz wrote: El día Saturday, May 03, 2014 a las 04:59:48PM -0700, Kevin Oberman escribió: On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Set it to the lowest available Cx state that you see in dev.cpu.0 . Available is not required. Set it to C8. That guarantees that you will use the lowest available. The correct incantation in rc.conf is Cmax. performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax But, unless you want laggy performance, you will probably also want: hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 in /boot/loader.conf. Low Cx states and TCC/throttling simply don't mix well and TCC is not effective, as mentioned earlier in this thread. Re/ powerd I have in /etc/rc.conf: # powerd powerd_enable=YES powerd_flags=-a max -b adp # performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax (and the additional hint.* in /boot/loader.conf as well). Which process 'performance_cx_lowest' and 'economy_cx_lowest' target exactly as config values? Thx matthias In a pretty unscientific test on my laptop (Lenovo T530 with Intel i5 3320M), setting hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest=C8 lowered power consumption at idle by about 3 watts, which adds about 30-45 minutes to my battery life during conservative usage. Using PCBSD 10, so hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 was already set (apparently solves some issue with powerd on some AMD systems) I have added hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 but not sure where to expect to see a difference. -- Allan Jude signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 2014-05-04 11:47, Allan Jude wrote: On 2014-05-04 10:28, Matthias Apitz wrote: El día Saturday, May 03, 2014 a las 04:59:48PM -0700, Kevin Oberman escribió: On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Set it to the lowest available Cx state that you see in dev.cpu.0 . Available is not required. Set it to C8. That guarantees that you will use the lowest available. The correct incantation in rc.conf is Cmax. performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax But, unless you want laggy performance, you will probably also want: hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 in /boot/loader.conf. Low Cx states and TCC/throttling simply don't mix well and TCC is not effective, as mentioned earlier in this thread. Re/ powerd I have in /etc/rc.conf: # powerd powerd_enable=YES powerd_flags=-a max -b adp # performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax (and the additional hint.* in /boot/loader.conf as well). Which process 'performance_cx_lowest' and 'economy_cx_lowest' target exactly as config values? Thx matthias In a pretty unscientific test on my laptop (Lenovo T530 with Intel i5 3320M), setting hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest=C8 lowered power consumption at idle by about 3 watts, which adds about 30-45 minutes to my battery life during conservative usage. Using PCBSD 10, so hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 was already set (apparently solves some issue with powerd on some AMD systems) I have added hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 but not sure where to expect to see a difference. I see the difference now, with the p4tcc stuff disabled, the lowest cpufreq is now 1200mhz instead of 150mhz -- Allan Jude signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 05/04/14 10:05, Allan Jude wrote: On 2014-05-04 11:47, Allan Jude wrote: On 2014-05-04 10:28, Matthias Apitz wrote: El día Saturday, May 03, 2014 a las 04:59:48PM -0700, Kevin Oberman escribió: On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Set it to the lowest available Cx state that you see in dev.cpu.0 . Available is not required. Set it to C8. That guarantees that you will use the lowest available. The correct incantation in rc.conf is Cmax. performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax But, unless you want laggy performance, you will probably also want: hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 in /boot/loader.conf. Low Cx states and TCC/throttling simply don't mix well and TCC is not effective, as mentioned earlier in this thread. Re/ powerd I have in /etc/rc.conf: # powerd powerd_enable=YES powerd_flags=-a max -b adp # performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax (and the additional hint.* in /boot/loader.conf as well). Which process 'performance_cx_lowest' and 'economy_cx_lowest' target exactly as config values? Thx matthias In a pretty unscientific test on my laptop (Lenovo T530 with Intel i5 3320M), setting hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest=C8 lowered power consumption at idle by about 3 watts, which adds about 30-45 minutes to my battery life during conservative usage. Using PCBSD 10, so hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 was already set (apparently solves some issue with powerd on some AMD systems) I have added hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 but not sure where to expect to see a difference. I see the difference now, with the p4tcc stuff disabled, the lowest cpufreq is now 1200mhz instead of 150mhz I just set the default for acpi_throttle and p4tcc in HEAD to disabled by adding these line to the default /boot/device.hints. If you want them back, editing your device.hints will restore them. This can be reverted if many people want throttling enabled by default, but all I have heard so far -- and for the past many years -- is a unanimous chorus to turn it off. -Nathan ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Hm, I was hoping for a little more discussion. Mostly around the which older CPUs do we leave this on for? crowd. I have Pentium-M class hardware that I was going to spin up -HEAD on. So I'll go install -HEAD on said older hardware and get a list of what does and doesn't work. I'm totally fine with disabling p4tcc and acpi_throttle if P states for cpu frequency adjustment are available. I just want to ensure that the temperature throttling stuff is going to get automatically engaged (by whichever magical BIOS/ACPI/SMI thing does it) and clock things down if the CPU gets way too hot. -a On 4 May 2014 10:07, Nathan Whitehorn nwhiteh...@freebsd.org wrote: On 05/04/14 10:05, Allan Jude wrote: On 2014-05-04 11:47, Allan Jude wrote: On 2014-05-04 10:28, Matthias Apitz wrote: El día Saturday, May 03, 2014 a las 04:59:48PM -0700, Kevin Oberman escribió: On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Set it to the lowest available Cx state that you see in dev.cpu.0 . Available is not required. Set it to C8. That guarantees that you will use the lowest available. The correct incantation in rc.conf is Cmax. performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax But, unless you want laggy performance, you will probably also want: hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 in /boot/loader.conf. Low Cx states and TCC/throttling simply don't mix well and TCC is not effective, as mentioned earlier in this thread. Re/ powerd I have in /etc/rc.conf: # powerd powerd_enable=YES powerd_flags=-a max -b adp # performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax (and the additional hint.* in /boot/loader.conf as well). Which process 'performance_cx_lowest' and 'economy_cx_lowest' target exactly as config values? Thx matthias In a pretty unscientific test on my laptop (Lenovo T530 with Intel i5 3320M), setting hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest=C8 lowered power consumption at idle by about 3 watts, which adds about 30-45 minutes to my battery life during conservative usage. Using PCBSD 10, so hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 was already set (apparently solves some issue with powerd on some AMD systems) I have added hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 but not sure where to expect to see a difference. I see the difference now, with the p4tcc stuff disabled, the lowest cpufreq is now 1200mhz instead of 150mhz I just set the default for acpi_throttle and p4tcc in HEAD to disabled by adding these line to the default /boot/device.hints. If you want them back, editing your device.hints will restore them. This can be reverted if many people want throttling enabled by default, but all I have heard so far -- and for the past many years -- is a unanimous chorus to turn it off. -Nathan ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Sun, May 4, 2014 at 10:07 AM, Nathan Whitehorn nwhiteh...@freebsd.orgwrote: On 05/04/14 10:05, Allan Jude wrote: On 2014-05-04 11:47, Allan Jude wrote: On 2014-05-04 10:28, Matthias Apitz wrote: El día Saturday, May 03, 2014 a las 04:59:48PM -0700, Kevin Oberman escribió: On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Set it to the lowest available Cx state that you see in dev.cpu.0 . Available is not required. Set it to C8. That guarantees that you will use the lowest available. The correct incantation in rc.conf is Cmax. performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax But, unless you want laggy performance, you will probably also want: hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 in /boot/loader.conf. Low Cx states and TCC/throttling simply don't mix well and TCC is not effective, as mentioned earlier in this thread. Re/ powerd I have in /etc/rc.conf: # powerd powerd_enable=YES powerd_flags=-a max -b adp # performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax (and the additional hint.* in /boot/loader.conf as well). Which process 'performance_cx_lowest' and 'economy_cx_lowest' target exactly as config values? Thx matthias In a pretty unscientific test on my laptop (Lenovo T530 with Intel i5 3320M), setting hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest=C8 lowered power consumption at idle by about 3 watts, which adds about 30-45 minutes to my battery life during conservative usage. Using PCBSD 10, so hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 was already set (apparently solves some issue with powerd on some AMD systems) I have added hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 but not sure where to expect to see a difference. I see the difference now, with the p4tcc stuff disabled, the lowest cpufreq is now 1200mhz instead of 150mhz I just set the default for acpi_throttle and p4tcc in HEAD to disabled by adding these line to the default /boot/device.hints. If you want them back, editing your device.hints will restore them. This can be reverted if many people want throttling enabled by default, but all I have heard so far -- and for the past many years -- is a unanimous chorus to turn it off. -Nathan Anyone playing around with Thermal Management should read the article on Tom's Hardware on the subject. It explains things quite nicely. Even I could understand it. :-) http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-cooler-fails,1695-3.html The section on Thermal Monitor 2 was new to me as it has been added since I last researched this several years ago. Note the tie-in between TM2 and EST rather than simple throttling (skipping N of every 8 clock cycles). Section 2 of the article has thermal specs on a lot of processors, too.. Bottom line of the article is to make sure TM2 is enabled and just leave it alone to do its thing. No throttling of any sort for power mis-management. The one area that can stand a close look is the algorithm for adjusting EST. It probably will make far less difference than C-states, but it is a legitimate power management technique and it is under the control of powerd. Several people have suggested modification for this and I think it's at least worth a look. Finally, if we don't default p4tcc and throttling to off and change the default for C-states to Cmax, a lot of people will be very unhappy. Disabling throttling really must come first. -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired E-mail: rkober...@gmail.co rkober...@gmail.com ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
throttling is disabled now. -a On 4 May 2014 21:27, Kevin Oberman rkober...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 4, 2014 at 10:07 AM, Nathan Whitehorn nwhiteh...@freebsd.orgwrote: On 05/04/14 10:05, Allan Jude wrote: On 2014-05-04 11:47, Allan Jude wrote: On 2014-05-04 10:28, Matthias Apitz wrote: El día Saturday, May 03, 2014 a las 04:59:48PM -0700, Kevin Oberman escribió: On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Set it to the lowest available Cx state that you see in dev.cpu.0 . Available is not required. Set it to C8. That guarantees that you will use the lowest available. The correct incantation in rc.conf is Cmax. performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax But, unless you want laggy performance, you will probably also want: hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 in /boot/loader.conf. Low Cx states and TCC/throttling simply don't mix well and TCC is not effective, as mentioned earlier in this thread. Re/ powerd I have in /etc/rc.conf: # powerd powerd_enable=YES powerd_flags=-a max -b adp # performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax (and the additional hint.* in /boot/loader.conf as well). Which process 'performance_cx_lowest' and 'economy_cx_lowest' target exactly as config values? Thx matthias In a pretty unscientific test on my laptop (Lenovo T530 with Intel i5 3320M), setting hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest=C8 lowered power consumption at idle by about 3 watts, which adds about 30-45 minutes to my battery life during conservative usage. Using PCBSD 10, so hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 was already set (apparently solves some issue with powerd on some AMD systems) I have added hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 but not sure where to expect to see a difference. I see the difference now, with the p4tcc stuff disabled, the lowest cpufreq is now 1200mhz instead of 150mhz I just set the default for acpi_throttle and p4tcc in HEAD to disabled by adding these line to the default /boot/device.hints. If you want them back, editing your device.hints will restore them. This can be reverted if many people want throttling enabled by default, but all I have heard so far -- and for the past many years -- is a unanimous chorus to turn it off. -Nathan Anyone playing around with Thermal Management should read the article on Tom's Hardware on the subject. It explains things quite nicely. Even I could understand it. :-) http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-cooler-fails,1695-3.html The section on Thermal Monitor 2 was new to me as it has been added since I last researched this several years ago. Note the tie-in between TM2 and EST rather than simple throttling (skipping N of every 8 clock cycles). Section 2 of the article has thermal specs on a lot of processors, too.. Bottom line of the article is to make sure TM2 is enabled and just leave it alone to do its thing. No throttling of any sort for power mis-management. The one area that can stand a close look is the algorithm for adjusting EST. It probably will make far less difference than C-states, but it is a legitimate power management technique and it is under the control of powerd. Several people have suggested modification for this and I think it's at least worth a look. Finally, if we don't default p4tcc and throttling to off and change the default for C-states to Cmax, a lot of people will be very unhappy. Disabling throttling really must come first. -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired E-mail: rkober...@gmail.co rkober...@gmail.com ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
El día Tuesday, April 01, 2014 a las 08:38:28AM +0100, David Chisnall escribió: Just a small note here: Improving power management is something that the Core Team and the Foundation have jointly identified as an important goal, in particular for mobile / embedded scenarios. We're currently coordinating potential sponsors for the work and soliciting proposals from people interested in doing the work. If you know of anyone in either category then please drop either me, core, or the Foundation an email. Hello, Using every day one of my FreeBSD netbooks (see below), I know very well that improving power management and by this the uptime while running on battery is a serious issue. I'm currently surprised about the big diff between two of my netbooks, one running 1 hour only while the other runs ~4 hours. I'm thinking about building a cable connection between the battery and the netbooks to measure the exact power drain (normally one can not see this because the battery is connected into its bay and you can not put any meter in there). I'm an experienced C-programmer and long time FreeBSD user and tester and I'm willing to dig deeper into this work. Please let me know if there is something to work on. Attached below is a description of the two mentioned netbooks and their uptime values. Thanks matthias comparing battery life time of [EeePC 900] and [Acer Aspire One D250] | EeePC 900 | Acer Aspire One D250 --+-+ CPU | 900 MHz Intel Celeron M 353 | 2x Intel Atom CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz RAM | 2 GByte | 1 GByte disk | 2x SSD (4 GB, 16 GB)| WDC WD2500BEVT-22ZCT0 11.01A11 | | ATA-8 SATA 2.x, 238475MB display | TFT 1024x600 9 | TFT 1024x600 10 FreeBSD | 10-CURRENT r255948 | 10-CURRENT r250588 KDE | 4.10.5 | 3.5.10 WAN (UMTS)| USB u3g Huawei E1750| USB u3g Huawei E1750 --+-+ battery | Li-ion A22-701 7.4V 7200mAh | Li-ion UM08B74 11.1V 5200mAh / 54Wh | 53.380Wh| 57.720Wh --+-+ uptime| ~1 hours| ~4 hours --+-+ -- Matthias Apitz | /\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign: E-mail: g...@unixarea.de | \ / - No HTML/RTF in E-mail WWW: http://www.unixarea.de/ | X- No proprietary attachments phone: +49-170-4527211 | / \ - Respect for open standards | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Ribbon_Campaign ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Hi, I'm working on adding some more power management logging support to freebsd-head so we can start to get a better grip on sleep/wakeup occurances. That should help us start to figure out where the power consumption is going. But on that EEEPC 900, just make sure you've set dev.cpu.0.cx_lowest to something lower than C1. -a On 3 May 2014 08:57, Matthias Apitz g...@unixarea.de wrote: El día Tuesday, April 01, 2014 a las 08:38:28AM +0100, David Chisnall escribió: Just a small note here: Improving power management is something that the Core Team and the Foundation have jointly identified as an important goal, in particular for mobile / embedded scenarios. We're currently coordinating potential sponsors for the work and soliciting proposals from people interested in doing the work. If you know of anyone in either category then please drop either me, core, or the Foundation an email. Hello, Using every day one of my FreeBSD netbooks (see below), I know very well that improving power management and by this the uptime while running on battery is a serious issue. I'm currently surprised about the big diff between two of my netbooks, one running 1 hour only while the other runs ~4 hours. I'm thinking about building a cable connection between the battery and the netbooks to measure the exact power drain (normally one can not see this because the battery is connected into its bay and you can not put any meter in there). I'm an experienced C-programmer and long time FreeBSD user and tester and I'm willing to dig deeper into this work. Please let me know if there is something to work on. Attached below is a description of the two mentioned netbooks and their uptime values. Thanks matthias comparing battery life time of [EeePC 900] and [Acer Aspire One D250] | EeePC 900 | Acer Aspire One D250 --+-+ CPU | 900 MHz Intel Celeron M 353 | 2x Intel Atom CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz RAM | 2 GByte | 1 GByte disk | 2x SSD (4 GB, 16 GB)| WDC WD2500BEVT-22ZCT0 11.01A11 | | ATA-8 SATA 2.x, 238475MB display | TFT 1024x600 9 | TFT 1024x600 10 FreeBSD | 10-CURRENT r255948 | 10-CURRENT r250588 KDE | 4.10.5 | 3.5.10 WAN (UMTS)| USB u3g Huawei E1750| USB u3g Huawei E1750 --+-+ battery | Li-ion A22-701 7.4V 7200mAh | Li-ion UM08B74 11.1V 5200mAh / 54Wh | 53.380Wh| 57.720Wh --+-+ uptime| ~1 hours| ~4 hours --+-+ -- Matthias Apitz | /\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign: E-mail: g...@unixarea.de | \ / - No HTML/RTF in E-mail WWW: http://www.unixarea.de/ | X- No proprietary attachments phone: +49-170-4527211 | / \ - Respect for open standards | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Ribbon_Campaign ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
El día Saturday, May 03, 2014 a las 09:37:08AM -0700, Adrian Chadd escribió: Hi, I'm working on adding some more power management logging support to freebsd-head so we can start to get a better grip on sleep/wakeup occurances. That should help us start to figure out where the power consumption is going. But on that EEEPC 900, just make sure you've set dev.cpu.0.cx_lowest to something lower than C1. Hi, I can't check it in my EeePC at the moment, because it has no power at all, its porwer suply faulted two days ago (broken cable). To which value I should have set dev.cpu.0.cx_lowest? I do not remember having it changed at all. Thx matthias -- Matthias Apitz | /\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign: E-mail: g...@unixarea.de | \ / - No HTML/RTF in E-mail WWW: http://www.unixarea.de/ | X- No proprietary attachments phone: +49-170-4527211 | / \ - Respect for open standards | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Ribbon_Campaign ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Set it to the lowest available Cx state that you see in dev.cpu.0 . -a On 3 May 2014 12:23, Matthias Apitz g...@unixarea.de wrote: El día Saturday, May 03, 2014 a las 09:37:08AM -0700, Adrian Chadd escribió: Hi, I'm working on adding some more power management logging support to freebsd-head so we can start to get a better grip on sleep/wakeup occurances. That should help us start to figure out where the power consumption is going. But on that EEEPC 900, just make sure you've set dev.cpu.0.cx_lowest to something lower than C1. Hi, I can't check it in my EeePC at the moment, because it has no power at all, its porwer suply faulted two days ago (broken cable). To which value I should have set dev.cpu.0.cx_lowest? I do not remember having it changed at all. Thx matthias -- Matthias Apitz | /\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign: E-mail: g...@unixarea.de | \ / - No HTML/RTF in E-mail WWW: http://www.unixarea.de/ | X- No proprietary attachments phone: +49-170-4527211 | / \ - Respect for open standards | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Ribbon_Campaign ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Set it to the lowest available Cx state that you see in dev.cpu.0 . Available is not required. Set it to C8. That guarantees that you will use the lowest available. The correct incantation in rc.conf is Cmax. performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax But, unless you want laggy performance, you will probably also want: hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 in /boot/loader.conf. Low Cx states and TCC/throttling simply don't mix well and TCC is not effective, as mentioned earlier in this thread. -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired E-mail: rkober...@gmail.com ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 05/03/14 16:59, Kevin Oberman wrote: On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Set it to the lowest available Cx state that you see in dev.cpu.0 . Available is not required. Set it to C8. That guarantees that you will use the lowest available. The correct incantation in rc.conf is Cmax. performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax But, unless you want laggy performance, you will probably also want: hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 in /boot/loader.conf. Low Cx states and TCC/throttling simply don't mix well and TCC is not effective, as mentioned earlier in this thread. Is there any reason that TCC is on by default, actually? It seems like an anti-feature. -Nathan ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
TCC is fine. TCC for doing anything other than _thermal throttling_ these days isn't. I've been kind of trying hard to avoid touching it as I'm worried it'll stick to me, but something tells me i'm just going to have to bite the bullet and grab ownership of this stuff... :( -a On 3 May 2014 18:07, Nathan Whitehorn nwhiteh...@freebsd.org wrote: On 05/03/14 16:59, Kevin Oberman wrote: On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Set it to the lowest available Cx state that you see in dev.cpu.0 . Available is not required. Set it to C8. That guarantees that you will use the lowest available. The correct incantation in rc.conf is Cmax. performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax But, unless you want laggy performance, you will probably also want: hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 in /boot/loader.conf. Low Cx states and TCC/throttling simply don't mix well and TCC is not effective, as mentioned earlier in this thread. Is there any reason that TCC is on by default, actually? It seems like an anti-feature. -Nathan ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 6:07 PM, Nathan Whitehorn nwhiteh...@freebsd.orgwrote: On 05/03/14 16:59, Kevin Oberman wrote: On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Set it to the lowest available Cx state that you see in dev.cpu.0 . Available is not required. Set it to C8. That guarantees that you will use the lowest available. The correct incantation in rc.conf is Cmax. performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax But, unless you want laggy performance, you will probably also want: hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 in /boot/loader.conf. Low Cx states and TCC/throttling simply don't mix well and TCC is not effective, as mentioned earlier in this thread. Is there any reason that TCC is on by default, actually? It seems like an anti-feature. I've been baffled by this for years. Throttling was first. SpeedStep was about all that was available for power management and even that was not available for older laptops. It was thought that throttling was a way to get some power management for those older systems. Nate was developing the first power management for FreeBSD and the first implementation of SST. He threw in throttling as both an added capability an something for older laptops that lacked SpeedStep. It made sense to me, too, After all, SST only provided two performance levels. It was an improvement from nothing, but not a really a lot and, mostly because neither of us thought about it enough, we really believed throttling was a help. Before cpufreq was committed, the Pentium 4 came out, including TCC which did what throttling did,but much more cleanly.So cpufreq was modified to use TCC if available and throttling when not. In retrospect, this was pretty dumb, but it made sense at the time. Soon after that, EST (true P-states) came out. It really reduced power consumption in normal applications. A driver for it was added fairly quickly, but throttling/TCC remained. Its only real effect was to add several many more frequencies to powerd, taking longer to save power when the CPU was lightly loaded and causing lag in speeding up when things got busy. Next, along came C-states and, almost simultaneously, D-states. Dx was very closely linked to the hardware and savings were often limited, but C-states were the real deal. This was a huge change as it really did save power. Unfortunately people started reporting that Cx states were causing CPU lockup and very laggy interactive behavior. As a result, the default setting for Cx states was to disable them. This was a really bad choice. It was made without any analysis of why.Cx was hanging systems and working badly, so turn it off. It took me very little time to discover the problem.My old laptop at the time this happened as a Pentium-M with a lowest P-state of 800 MHz. Ass TCC and the idle clock was effectively just 100 MHz. When you combine the way powerd adjusted speed and C-states, the best you can hope for is crappy interactivity. It just took way too long to get out of the lowest idle state. I can't explain the hangs as I never experienced them, but simply turning off TCC (and throttling) prevented it. It looked like the obvious thing to do was to turn off TCC and make full use of C-states. This became even more blindingly obvious when mav put up his very excellent paper on power management on FreeBSD. If you care about power management and have not read it, do so now! https://wiki.freebsd.org/TuningPowerConsumption Why mav's suggestions were not made default,I simply don't understand. I'm sure much of it is that FreeBSD is developed primarily for servers and people seem to often not care much about power savings on servers, though this is finally changing. I think I got most of the history correct, though it goes back to v4, a lot of years ago. Since I retired, I no longer have access to my old mail, so I may have gotten some details wrong. If so, I apologize. -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired E-mail: rkober...@gmail.com ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Hi, Well, hardware got better. A lot better. I'm happy to leave speedstep and throttling in there but teach powerd about using C-states and limited frequency stepping if it's available. So, how about something like this: * if C states are available - let's just use C states and not step the cpu frequency at all; * if turboboost is available - enable that, and disable it if we notice the CPU runs at the higher frequency for too long; * use cpufreq with some heuristics (like say, only step down to 2/3rd the frequency if idle) - and document why that decision is made (eg on CPU X, measuring Y at idle, power consumption was minimal at frequency=Z.); * make sure the lower frequencies and tcc kick in if a thermal cutoff is reached; * default to using lower Cx states out of the box if they're decided to not be buggy. There are a few CPUs for which lower C states cause problems but modernish hardware (say, nehalem and later) should be fine. That's vaguely what I've been tossing around in my head. -a On 3 May 2014 21:16, Kevin Oberman rkober...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 6:07 PM, Nathan Whitehorn nwhiteh...@freebsd.org wrote: On 05/03/14 16:59, Kevin Oberman wrote: On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Set it to the lowest available Cx state that you see in dev.cpu.0 . Available is not required. Set it to C8. That guarantees that you will use the lowest available. The correct incantation in rc.conf is Cmax. performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax But, unless you want laggy performance, you will probably also want: hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 in /boot/loader.conf. Low Cx states and TCC/throttling simply don't mix well and TCC is not effective, as mentioned earlier in this thread. Is there any reason that TCC is on by default, actually? It seems like an anti-feature. I've been baffled by this for years. Throttling was first. SpeedStep was about all that was available for power management and even that was not available for older laptops. It was thought that throttling was a way to get some power management for those older systems. Nate was developing the first power management for FreeBSD and the first implementation of SST. He threw in throttling as both an added capability an something for older laptops that lacked SpeedStep. It made sense to me, too, After all, SST only provided two performance levels. It was an improvement from nothing, but not a really a lot and, mostly because neither of us thought about it enough, we really believed throttling was a help. Before cpufreq was committed, the Pentium 4 came out, including TCC which did what throttling did,but much more cleanly.So cpufreq was modified to use TCC if available and throttling when not. In retrospect, this was pretty dumb, but it made sense at the time. Soon after that, EST (true P-states) came out. It really reduced power consumption in normal applications. A driver for it was added fairly quickly, but throttling/TCC remained. Its only real effect was to add several many more frequencies to powerd, taking longer to save power when the CPU was lightly loaded and causing lag in speeding up when things got busy. Next, along came C-states and, almost simultaneously, D-states. Dx was very closely linked to the hardware and savings were often limited, but C-states were the real deal. This was a huge change as it really did save power. Unfortunately people started reporting that Cx states were causing CPU lockup and very laggy interactive behavior. As a result, the default setting for Cx states was to disable them. This was a really bad choice. It was made without any analysis of why.Cx was hanging systems and working badly, so turn it off. It took me very little time to discover the problem.My old laptop at the time this happened as a Pentium-M with a lowest P-state of 800 MHz. Ass TCC and the idle clock was effectively just 100 MHz. When you combine the way powerd adjusted speed and C-states, the best you can hope for is crappy interactivity. It just took way too long to get out of the lowest idle state. I can't explain the hangs as I never experienced them, but simply turning off TCC (and throttling) prevented it. It looked like the obvious thing to do was to turn off TCC and make full use of C-states. This became even more blindingly obvious when mav put up his very excellent paper on power management on FreeBSD. If you care about power management and have not read it, do so now! https://wiki.freebsd.org/TuningPowerConsumption Why mav's suggestions were not made default,I simply don't understand. I'm sure much of it is that FreeBSD is developed primarily for servers and people seem to often not care much about power savings on servers, though this is finally changing. I think I got most of the history correct, though it goes back to v4, a lot of years ago. Since I retired, I no
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 2014-05-04 00:49, Adrian Chadd wrote: Hi, Well, hardware got better. A lot better. I'm happy to leave speedstep and throttling in there but teach powerd about using C-states and limited frequency stepping if it's available. So, how about something like this: * if C states are available - let's just use C states and not step the cpu frequency at all; * if turboboost is available - enable that, and disable it if we notice the CPU runs at the higher frequency for too long; If I recall correctly, the BIOS has settings that control and limit how long the CPU will run in 'turbo boost' mode * use cpufreq with some heuristics (like say, only step down to 2/3rd the frequency if idle) - and document why that decision is made (eg on CPU X, measuring Y at idle, power consumption was minimal at frequency=Z.); * make sure the lower frequencies and tcc kick in if a thermal cutoff is reached; * default to using lower Cx states out of the box if they're decided to not be buggy. There are a few CPUs for which lower C states cause problems but modernish hardware (say, nehalem and later) should be fine. According to the wiki, in 9.x and onward there is code that is supposed to detect if the higher Cx states are usable, and not use them if they are not, but I do not know how well this works. That's vaguely what I've been tossing around in my head. -a On 3 May 2014 21:16, Kevin Oberman rkober...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 6:07 PM, Nathan Whitehorn nwhiteh...@freebsd.org wrote: On 05/03/14 16:59, Kevin Oberman wrote: On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Set it to the lowest available Cx state that you see in dev.cpu.0 . Available is not required. Set it to C8. That guarantees that you will use the lowest available. The correct incantation in rc.conf is Cmax. performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax But, unless you want laggy performance, you will probably also want: hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 in /boot/loader.conf. Low Cx states and TCC/throttling simply don't mix well and TCC is not effective, as mentioned earlier in this thread. Is there any reason that TCC is on by default, actually? It seems like an anti-feature. I've been baffled by this for years. Throttling was first. SpeedStep was about all that was available for power management and even that was not available for older laptops. It was thought that throttling was a way to get some power management for those older systems. Nate was developing the first power management for FreeBSD and the first implementation of SST. He threw in throttling as both an added capability an something for older laptops that lacked SpeedStep. It made sense to me, too, After all, SST only provided two performance levels. It was an improvement from nothing, but not a really a lot and, mostly because neither of us thought about it enough, we really believed throttling was a help. Before cpufreq was committed, the Pentium 4 came out, including TCC which did what throttling did,but much more cleanly.So cpufreq was modified to use TCC if available and throttling when not. In retrospect, this was pretty dumb, but it made sense at the time. Soon after that, EST (true P-states) came out. It really reduced power consumption in normal applications. A driver for it was added fairly quickly, but throttling/TCC remained. Its only real effect was to add several many more frequencies to powerd, taking longer to save power when the CPU was lightly loaded and causing lag in speeding up when things got busy. Next, along came C-states and, almost simultaneously, D-states. Dx was very closely linked to the hardware and savings were often limited, but C-states were the real deal. This was a huge change as it really did save power. Unfortunately people started reporting that Cx states were causing CPU lockup and very laggy interactive behavior. As a result, the default setting for Cx states was to disable them. This was a really bad choice. It was made without any analysis of why.Cx was hanging systems and working badly, so turn it off. It took me very little time to discover the problem.My old laptop at the time this happened as a Pentium-M with a lowest P-state of 800 MHz. Ass TCC and the idle clock was effectively just 100 MHz. When you combine the way powerd adjusted speed and C-states, the best you can hope for is crappy interactivity. It just took way too long to get out of the lowest idle state. I can't explain the hangs as I never experienced them, but simply turning off TCC (and throttling) prevented it. It looked like the obvious thing to do was to turn off TCC and make full use of C-states. This became even more blindingly obvious when mav put up his very excellent paper on power management on FreeBSD. If you care about power management and have not read it, do so now!
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 3 May 2014 21:52, Allan Jude free...@allanjude.com wrote: On 2014-05-04 00:49, Adrian Chadd wrote: Hi, Well, hardware got better. A lot better. I'm happy to leave speedstep and throttling in there but teach powerd about using C-states and limited frequency stepping if it's available. So, how about something like this: * if C states are available - let's just use C states and not step the cpu frequency at all; * if turboboost is available - enable that, and disable it if we notice the CPU runs at the higher frequency for too long; If I recall correctly, the BIOS has settings that control and limit how long the CPU will run in 'turbo boost' mode So, there's daemons running around in SMI or silicon or something else that's doing dirty, dirty things with the target frequency per-core. It seems to monitor the core frequencies and temperatures to decide what a suitable turboboost target is. We could just leave it on and only switch it off (and go to P1 instead of P0, or whatever the nomenclature is) after some long period of time. Or drop to P1 if the cpu temperature is too hot (ie to coax it to cool down quicker.) * use cpufreq with some heuristics (like say, only step down to 2/3rd the frequency if idle) - and document why that decision is made (eg on CPU X, measuring Y at idle, power consumption was minimal at frequency=Z.); * make sure the lower frequencies and tcc kick in if a thermal cutoff is reached; * default to using lower Cx states out of the box if they're decided to not be buggy. There are a few CPUs for which lower C states cause problems but modernish hardware (say, nehalem and later) should be fine. According to the wiki, in 9.x and onward there is code that is supposed to detect if the higher Cx states are usable, and not use them if they are not, but I do not know how well this works. I'm not sure. I think those who care / know enough just put relevant bits into /etc/rc.conf and /boot/loader.conf rather than flipping it on by default. I'm kind of tempted to just flip on Cmax by default and teach powerd to not do cpufreq unless there's a thermal issue. Then take a step back and see what happens. -a ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 9:49 PM, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Hi, Well, hardware got better. A lot better. I'm happy to leave speedstep and throttling in there but teach powerd about using C-states and limited frequency stepping if it's available. So, how about something like this: * if C states are available - let's just use C states and not step the cpu frequency at all; C-states are great and I suspect that just C-states will do about as well as anything. I can't prove it, but I suspect using P-states with C is a bigger win, depending on load. * if turboboost is available - enable that, and disable it if we notice the CPU runs at the higher frequency for too long; I think that ACPI already limits runtime in turboboost mode., * use cpufreq with some heuristics (like say, only step down to 2/3rd the frequency if idle) - and document why that decision is made (eg on CPU X, measuring Y at idle, power consumption was minimal at frequency=Z.); Use CPUfreq to support available P-states.I trust that the good engineers at Intel knew what they were doing when they set them up on a given CPU. C-states Of course, only C-states should be used by cpufreq... not TCC or throttling. * make sure the lower frequencies and tcc kick in if a thermal cutoff is reached; I tought that this was an automatic function if not disabled by ACPI. * default to using lower Cx states out of the box if they're decided to not be buggy. There are a few CPUs for which lower C states cause problems but modernish hardware (say, nehalem and later) should be fine. Assuming we leave throttling/TCC out of it, I don't see any reason that ANY CPU with C-state capability should not run Cmax. I have never had any issue withe just C-states and P-states.It only seems to be an issue when combined with lowering thottling/TCC to low values. If the CPU gets so hot that TCC gets down to under 25% of the lowest p-state speed, something is very, very wrong with the hardware. That's vaguely what I've been tossing around in my head. -a On 3 May 2014 21:16, Kevin Oberman rkober...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 6:07 PM, Nathan Whitehorn nwhiteh...@freebsd.org wrote: On 05/03/14 16:59, Kevin Oberman wrote: On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Set it to the lowest available Cx state that you see in dev.cpu.0 . Available is not required. Set it to C8. That guarantees that you will use the lowest available. The correct incantation in rc.conf is Cmax. performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax But, unless you want laggy performance, you will probably also want: hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 in /boot/loader.conf. Low Cx states and TCC/throttling simply don't mix well and TCC is not effective, as mentioned earlier in this thread. Is there any reason that TCC is on by default, actually? It seems like an anti-feature. I've been baffled by this for years. Throttling was first. SpeedStep was about all that was available for power management and even that was not available for older laptops. It was thought that throttling was a way to get some power management for those older systems. Nate was developing the first power management for FreeBSD and the first implementation of SST. He threw in throttling as both an added capability an something for older laptops that lacked SpeedStep. It made sense to me, too, After all, SST only provided two performance levels. It was an improvement from nothing, but not a really a lot and, mostly because neither of us thought about it enough, we really believed throttling was a help. Before cpufreq was committed, the Pentium 4 came out, including TCC which did what throttling did,but much more cleanly.So cpufreq was modified to use TCC if available and throttling when not. In retrospect, this was pretty dumb, but it made sense at the time. Soon after that, EST (true P-states) came out. It really reduced power consumption in normal applications. A driver for it was added fairly quickly, but throttling/TCC remained. Its only real effect was to add several many more frequencies to powerd, taking longer to save power when the CPU was lightly loaded and causing lag in speeding up when things got busy. Next, along came C-states and, almost simultaneously, D-states. Dx was very closely linked to the hardware and savings were often limited, but C-states were the real deal. This was a huge change as it really did save power. Unfortunately people started reporting that Cx states were causing CPU lockup and very laggy interactive behavior. As a result, the default setting for Cx states was to disable them. This was a really bad choice. It was made without any analysis of why.Cx was hanging systems and working badly, so turn it off. It took me very little time to discover the problem.My old
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 7:14 PM, Alexey Dokuchaev da...@nsu.ru wrote: On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 03:10:22PM -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote: FreeBSD desktop since 3.3 (makes me a newbie!) I really dislike pulseaudio and have managed to live without it. Firefox works fine without it. Unfortunately they dropped OSS support a while go, so I now must use alsa, but it works well and without the pain of dealing with pulseaudio, a solution in search of a problem it I ever saw one. PA should just die, of course, just like that kid's other products. OSS is so nice; it supports all those nifty features like per-application mixing and stuff, we have a very strong implementation of it (kudos to ariff@, let me remind us all: http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/SOUND_4.TXT.html). Giving Firerox back its OSS support is my on TODO list, unfortunately I do not have any idea when (or if) I can look at it, but that would be a nice step in dealsificaion of our Ports Collection. OSS was, and should remain, the standard Unixish sound system API. Wow! That would be great! It's really annoying that some tools won't (not can't) do OSS. PA really had no reason to exist, but some people have such determination to do their own thing, even if it means throwing out a better solution. (OK, so the author did play some unfortunate games with licensing, but that was years ago.) Audio output is pretty system dependent, but I had little problem getting my audio to auto-switch to headphones when I plugged them in. The setup is a bit ugly,but I only had to check the available PINs (ugly, ugly) and set up stuff once. It just works. Not always, unfortunately. I also had a working pin override configuration in /boot/loader.conf, but after r236750 (major snd_hda driver rewrite) it stopped working. I've reported it and tried to get some support from mav@ but he never replied. Since then, I have to carry pre-r236750 version of snd_hda(4) to have working sound. Is that just in head? Do I have more fun to look forward to? Power is an issue and I find the current defaults suck. Read mav's article on the subject on the wiki. From reading that article, I've only added hw.pci.do_power_nodriver=3 and hw.pci.do_power_resume=0 to /boot/loader.conf. More aggressive settings, like cx_lowest=C2, made my laptop very sluggish and unpleasant to operate; powerd(8) behaves sanely with no tuning, so I wouldn't say that our current defaults suck. The reason why we're behind on the green lane is because we generally do not pay much attention when it comes to power-saving during development of FreeBSD. (I'd like to be proven wrong.) The key poblem with power, as I have written several times is the conflation of TCC or throttling as power management tools. Mix them (they really don't save power) with Cx states is often worse than what you are seeing. It canl cause many systems to lock up . Try setting: powerd_enable=YES performance_cx_lowest=Cmax economy_cx_lowest=Cmax into /etc/rc.conf and putting: # Disable CPU throttling hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 into /boot/loader.conf. That should work MUCH better and will really save power (assuming that your system supports better than C2 as C2 usually is a pretty minor power savings. C3 or higher is usually where things really start to improve. I've read a paper from SDSC (San Diego Supercomputer Center) showing that CX states are by far and away the most significant power saver and they should cause only very trivial and unnoticeable impact on performance. Number two is EST, but that is almost always enabled on FreeBSD, so I assume that you have that running already (or the AMD equivalent). ./danfe -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired E-mail: rkober...@gmail.com ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
There are a few alternatives to Lightroom available in Ports Collection, you might want to give them a try one day. offtopic: But it does not even come close to Lightroom. Gimp is also not even close to Photoshop. Maybe Pixelmator. But Gimp? The UI and usability is such a mess. But again it's the difference between free and paying alot of money. ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Since when is GIMP an alternative to Lightroom? I was talking about raw processors, not raster image manipulators. The opensource alternatives to Lightroom come not close to the original. The _same_ is true for GIMP which is hardly workable and is not more then a nice showcase but its usability is just horrible. ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 03:10:22PM -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote: FreeBSD desktop since 3.3 (makes me a newbie!) I really dislike pulseaudio and have managed to live without it. Firefox works fine without it. Unfortunately they dropped OSS support a while go, so I now must use alsa, but it works well and without the pain of dealing with pulseaudio, a solution in search of a problem it I ever saw one. PA should just die, of course, just like that kid's other products. OSS is so nice; it supports all those nifty features like per-application mixing and stuff, we have a very strong implementation of it (kudos to ariff@, let me remind us all: http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/SOUND_4.TXT.html). Giving Firerox back its OSS support is my on TODO list, unfortunately I do not have any idea when (or if) I can look at it, but that would be a nice step in dealsificaion of our Ports Collection. OSS was, and should remain, the standard Unixish sound system API. Audio output is pretty system dependent, but I had little problem getting my audio to auto-switch to headphones when I plugged them in. The setup is a bit ugly,but I only had to check the available PINs (ugly, ugly) and set up stuff once. It just works. Not always, unfortunately. I also had a working pin override configuration in /boot/loader.conf, but after r236750 (major snd_hda driver rewrite) it stopped working. I've reported it and tried to get some support from mav@ but he never replied. Since then, I have to carry pre-r236750 version of snd_hda(4) to have working sound. Power is an issue and I find the current defaults suck. Read mav's article on the subject on the wiki. From reading that article, I've only added hw.pci.do_power_nodriver=3 and hw.pci.do_power_resume=0 to /boot/loader.conf. More aggressive settings, like cx_lowest=C2, made my laptop very sluggish and unpleasant to operate; powerd(8) behaves sanely with no tuning, so I wouldn't say that our current defaults suck. The reason why we're behind on the green lane is because we generally do not pay much attention when it comes to power-saving during development of FreeBSD. (I'd like to be proven wrong.) ./danfe ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Thu, Apr 03, 2014 at 11:21:34AM +0200, Matthias Gamsjager wrote: Since when is GIMP an alternative to Lightroom? I was talking about raw processors, not raster image manipulators. The opensource alternatives to Lightroom come not close to the original. They maybe not yet a drop-in replacement, but they are competitive enough to be discussed on photo forums (read: outside open source geeky cabal): http://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/32-digital-processing-software-printing/242584-darktable-vs-lightroom.html http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/37238/how-does-darktable-compare-to-adobe-lightroom-for-editing-jpegs http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/23272/simple-comparison-of-lightroom-4-corel-aftershot-pro-darktable http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/39475179 As they say, The differences in actual editing are negligible. It's not even worth migrating between the two. LR comes with a price-tag, Darktable comes with bugs. ./danfe ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Thu, Apr 03, 2014 at 09:49:31AM +0200, Matthias Gamsjager wrote: There are a few alternatives to Lightroom available in Ports Collection, you might want to give them a try one day. offtopic: But it does not even come close to Lightroom. Gimp is also not even close to Photoshop. Maybe Pixelmator. But Gimp? The UI and usability is such a mess. Since when is GIMP an alternative to Lightroom? I was talking about raw processors, not raster image manipulators. ./danfe ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 08:38:28AM +0100, David Chisnall wrote: On 1 Apr 2014, at 08:11, Jordan Hubbard j...@mail.turbofuzz.com wrote: 1. Power. As you point out, being truly power efficient is a complete top-to-bottom engineering effort and it takes a lot more than just trying to idle the processor whenever possible to achieve that. You need to optimize all of the hot-spot routines in the system for power efficiency (which actually involves a fair amount of micro architecture knowledge), you need a kernel scheduler that is power management aware, you need a process management system that runs as few things as possible and knows how to schedule things during package wake-up intervals, you need timers to be coalesced at the level where applications consume them, the list just goes on and on. It's a lot of engineering work, and to drive that work you also need a lot of telemetry data and people with big sticks running around hitting people who write power-inefficient code. FreeBSD has neither. Thanks Jordan, this is an excellent elaboration on why exactly we're behind on the green lane, and on power-neglective FreeBSD development overall. Just a small note here: Improving power management is something that the Core Team and the Foundation have jointly identified as an important goal, in particular for mobile/embedded scenarios. We're currently coordinating potential sponsors for the work and soliciting proposals from people interested in doing the work. If you know of anyone in either category then please drop either me, core, or the Foundation an email. Some things have already seen progress, for example Davide's calloutng work includes timer coalescing, but there are still a lot of, uh, opportunities for improvement. The Symbian EKA2 book has some very interesting detail on their power management infrastructure, which would be worth looking at for anyone interested in working on this, and I believe your former employer had some expertise in this area. Now that's something I'm glad to hear. It would be cool if FreeBSD gained some power-efficient software that run smoothly together with hardware (and laptops in particular) developed by Jordan's former employer. ;-) For example, currently hald wakes up every 30 seconds and polls the optical drive if you have one. Why? Because there's no devd event when a CD is inserted, so the only way for it to get these notifications is polling. I'm surprised to find out that our devd(8) does not emit some event on CD insertion. On the other, if by hald you mean the one installed by the `sysutils/hal' port, I've personally never run it, and do not recommend it to anyone. ./danfe ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 1 Apr 2014, at 23:10, Kevin Oberman rkober...@gmail.com wrote: Audio output is pretty system dependent, but I had little problem getting my audio to auto-switch to headphones when I plugged them in. The setup is a bit ugly,but I only had to check the available PINs (ugly, ugly) and set up stuff once. It just works. If you want my example set-up, I can post it somewhere or you can look in the archives for it as I have posted it in the past. It would be good to have this in the handbook (and to see what we can do to improve it). FreeBSD audio typically works out of the box and it's great when it does[1], but it can be underdocumented black magic to make it work when it doesn't. For example, I believe it's possible to tell pcm that when it receives a stereo stream it should redirect the left channel to the front and rear left, and the right channel to the front and rear right, but I haven't yet worked out how to do this - I'd have thought it was the kind of default that we'd want to have. The use case that PulseAudio was [over]designed to fix was plugging in USB headphones (or connecting a Bluetooth headset) and having existing audio streams redirected there. This should be possible with the existing sound stack, but there are some bits of plumbing missing. We already do in-kernel mixing and resampling, which are the hard bits. Duplicating streams and redirecting them are trivial by comparison. David [1] Although I had a slightly embarrassing moment when I spent an hour hunting for docs to tell me how to configure my media centre box do 5.1 output and then decided to just try it and found it worked out of the box. ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Wed, Apr 02, 2014 at 10:22:32AM +0100, David Chisnall wrote: On 1 Apr 2014, at 23:10, Kevin Oberman rkober...@gmail.com wrote: Audio output is pretty system dependent, but I had little problem getting my audio to auto-switch to headphones when I plugged them in. The setup is a bit ugly,but I only had to check the available PINs (ugly, ugly) and set up stuff once. It just works. If you want my example set-up, I can post it somewhere or you can look in the archives for it as I have posted it in the past. It would be good to have this in the handbook (and to see what we can do to improve it). FreeBSD audio typically works out of the box and it's great when it does[1], but it can be underdocumented black magic to make it work when it doesn't. For example, I believe it's possible to tell pcm that when it receives a stereo stream it should redirect the left channel to the front and rear left, and the right channel to the front and rear right, but I haven't yet worked out how to do this - I'd have thought it was the kind of default that we'd want to have. The use case that PulseAudio was [over]designed to fix was plugging in USB headphones (or connecting a Bluetooth headset) and having existing audio streams redirected there. This should be possible with the existing sound stack, but there are some bits of plumbing missing. We already do in-kernel mixing and resampling, which are the hard bits. Duplicating streams and redirecting them are trivial by comparison. David [1] Although I had a slightly embarrassing moment when I spent an hour hunting for docs to tell me how to configure my media centre box do 5.1 output and then decided to just try it and found it worked out of the box. AFAIK we already can configure HDA's sound output and input in many ways using sysctl(8). What's still missing is a user-friendly way to configure sound. There are some things that can be handled in one little program / script / TUI / GUI / CLI: - Default sound unit (hw.snd.default_unit) - Use the last inserted sound device as default? (hw.snd.default_auto) - PIN Routing (dev.hdaa.%d.config) - Mixer settings Putting it all together in something called sndcontrol should not be too hard. It just takes someone(TM) to do it pgpm1Mkt0Pad2.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Apr 1, 2014, at 9:12 PM, Jim Thompson j...@netgate.com wrote: I have Macs at work (typing on one now), and a mac at home. I like them. [ … ] It’s just like being back in the 80s, when Unix had a desktop market, only much, much faster. Worry not, there’s a product just for you now! http://www.macstories.net/mac/cathode-is-a-vintage-terminal-for-os-x/ Of course I have a copy. I couldn’t resist buying it. - Jordan ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Apr 1, 2014, at 9:33 PM, Person, Roderick perso...@upmc.edu wrote: Why aren't all the nerds and small businesses out there a market? Too few of you to justify the capital outlay. Now, if we were talking about a $1500 watch that was very nerdy and appealed to the inner James Bond in lots of non-nerds, the margins might just justify it. If Apple hardware is too expensive for you, there is always Windows and a cheap PC clone. Between those two poles, the entirety of the desktop market is pretty much spoken for. I get that there are some (mostly on these mailing lists) who don’t want either, but religious / personal preferences to the contrary don’t create markets until there are at least a few million of you. ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:11 PM, Matt Olander m...@ixsystems.com wrote: This is like trying to predict automobile technology and dominant car-makers by 1905. There's always room for competition. Take a look at what's happening right now in the auto-industry. Tesla came out of nowhere 125 years after the invention of the automobile and is doing pretty well. I think you’re kind of making my point for me, Matt. :-) Tesla benefitted entirely from deep pockets on the part of its investors. Over $160M went into starting the company, of which $70M came from the personal checking account of Elon Musk, the current visionary and CEO, and to quote the wikipedia page: Tesla Motors is a public company that trades on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol TSLA.[5] In the first quarter of 2013, Tesla posted profits for the first time in its ten year history.” Yep, in other words, Tesla has been losing money for over 10 years and only just started turning a profit, after raising a “mere $187M in investment and $485M in loans from the US DOE. Your tax dollars at work! On top of all that Tesla has only managed to make money at all by focusing exclusively the highest end of the luxury car market, where profit margins are also the highest (the first car, the roadster, would set you back $110,000). Getting back to computer operating systems, it would make most readers of these lists choke on their Doritos to know how much Apple had to invest in Mac OS X before it became a viable desktop operating system and of course you’ve already seen folks screaming about how Apple gear is too expensive and they’ll never buy it. You just don’t get a consumer-grade desktop Unix OS, or a practical all-electric sedan, without serious monetary investment and a luxury marquee to match, assuming you’d like to actually make any of that money *back*. So, back to BSD on the desktop. Anyone got a spare $200M they’d like to just throw away? That’s what it’s going to take! :) Don’t believe me? Go ask someone who knows first-hand then. Ask Mark Shuttleworth: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/why-ubuntus-creator-still-invests-his-fortune-in-an-unprofitable-company/ :-) - Jordan ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 02.04.14 12:22, David Chisnall wrote: The use case that PulseAudio was [over]designed to fix was plugging in USB headphones (or connecting a Bluetooth headset) and having existing audio streams redirected there. Please don't ever make this behavior the default! Imagine, you have an audio setup mixing sound and pushing it out and then you plug in some USB device that also has audio capability and your production sound gets redirected there. A nightmare! Knowing what you do and the system behaving in predictable way is one of the beauties of UNIX and FreeBSD in particular. Don't make it so that even idiots can use it because then, only idiots will be using it! My 0.02, Daniel ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 2 Apr 2014, at 13:40, Daniel Kalchev dan...@digsys.bg wrote: On 02.04.14 12:22, David Chisnall wrote: The use case that PulseAudio was [over]designed to fix was plugging in USB headphones (or connecting a Bluetooth headset) and having existing audio streams redirected there. Please don't ever make this behavior the default! Imagine, you have an audio setup mixing sound and pushing it out and then you plug in some USB device that also has audio capability and your production sound gets redirected there. A nightmare! Do you really think that someone is going to be setting up an audio mixing environment without configuring their sound setup? Or that people doing this make up the majority of users? Knowing what you do and the system behaving in predictable way is one of the beauties of UNIX and FreeBSD in particular. I agree, however sane defaults are also very important to a useable system and these are not mutually exclusive. It is perfectly possible to have a system that has defaults that do what most users do (or a choice of defaults based on a simple selection of typical uses), but which is also configurable if you have unusual requirements. This is what we aim to do with FreeBSD. Don't make it so that even idiots can use it because then, only idiots will be using it! This kind of argument has no place in FreeBSD. You are not a better person because you use things that are hard to use. You are not a better person because you choose to do things the difficult way. You are not a better person because you prove your superiority by making life hard for others. David ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 02.04.14 15:52, David Chisnall wrote: On 2 Apr 2014, at 13:40, Daniel Kalchev dan...@digsys.bg wrote: On 02.04.14 12:22, David Chisnall wrote: The use case that PulseAudio was [over]designed to fix was plugging in USB headphones (or connecting a Bluetooth headset) and having existing audio streams redirected there. Please don't ever make this behavior the default! Imagine, you have an audio setup mixing sound and pushing it out and then you plug in some USB device that also has audio capability and your production sound gets redirected there. A nightmare! Do you really think that someone is going to be setting up an audio mixing environment without configuring their sound setup? Or that people doing this make up the majority of users? Twenty years ago, very unlikely. Today, very much possible. Especially if the behavior is not explicitly documented. Knowing what you do and the system behaving in predictable way is one of the beauties of UNIX and FreeBSD in particular. I agree, however sane defaults are also very important to a useable system and these are not mutually exclusive. It is perfectly possible to have a system that has defaults that do what most users do (or a choice of defaults based on a simple selection of typical uses), but which is also configurable if you have unusual requirements. This is what we aim to do with FreeBSD. I have no problems with the sound system supporting different setups. I just fail to see the usefulness of such configuration, except in the very trivial setup, where you have only one output device and add another. What if there are three output audio devices in the systems? Trivial with all the HDMI etc today. An overly auto-configuring system is a pain to deal with, sometimes. Especially if you cannot control some aspects of it's behavior. In such cases, you end up with a more complicated setup. Don't make it so that even idiots can use it because then, only idiots will be using it! This kind of argument has no place in FreeBSD. You are not a better person because you use things that are hard to use. You are not a better person because you choose to do things the difficult way. You are not a better person because you prove your superiority by making life hard for others. David This was uncalled for, really. Daniel ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 02.04.14 04:26, Adrian Chadd wrote: It's no longer xorg just speaks to the graphics chip. This is a common trend in computing recently. What once required tightly integrated OS/applications is now distributed, in the widest sense. The so called Personal Computer is nowadays actually spread out all around the globe -- some of your desktop applications or parts of them might actually run in a data center far, far away. Having lots of diskless workstations in my office, all running FreeBSD and fact being dumb X Windows terminals to a bunch of servers, where the actually applications run -- it is sometimes very difficult to even begin explaining this concept to colleagues who have seen nothing but the Windows PC. The display, keyboard, mouse etc might be running their own and different OS each. Therefore, I don't see this adding of abstraction layers as a bad thing, as it lets you have a FreeBSD workstation, running on an Android STB as the interface to your physical monitor/mouse/etc. What we should do instead is make sure that FreeBSD supports the respective APIs. Considering that today visualization is everywhere, I also don't see any problem running that particular Windows, or Linux only application in an VirtualBox window. Or (in my example office case), running something (Linux?) on the diskless workstations that handles the peculiarities of the particular video chip/audio etc and still providing you with the same desktop session on your FreeBSD servers. Daniel ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:10:22 -0700 Kevin Oberman rkober...@gmail.com wrote: No, mutt, with vim as mail composer. :) +1 matthias (FreeBSD since 2.2.5 and sending this from an EeePC 900, netbook, UMTS connected, KDE4 desktop, sound, webcam, vim, mutt, sendmail, ...) FreeBSD desktop since 3.3 (makes me a newbie!) FreeBSD server and desktop since 2.0 (replaced Ultrix 4.3 system). Does it makes me an oldie? I'm stuck since with FreeBSD on private systems and a couple of years ago, I had no problems even run servers based on FreeBSD for my department. I dislike this unspecific terminus desktop, since people seem to associate entertainment systems with neat graphics, mouse and other interesting human stuff (even audio). On the other hand, server seems hardcoded to unfancy 19inch rack-based plastic-metal-based clumsy and noisy high-performance systems stored in a dark air-conditioned cellar. But what is with the old-fashioned terminus workstation? In a more scientific environment, systems with the performance needs of a server but with the exterior habitus of a desktop were very often called workstation. Nowadays, we run a single remaining FreeBSD server and I kept my desktop system also working on FreeBSD (11.0, recent hardware, by the way). We had to change the other desktops (I prefer workstation) towards Linux due to the need of OpenCL in combination with some expensive TESLA boards for numerical modelling and datellite image processing. The software we used was mostly home-brewn so we didn't rely on commercial Linux-only stuff and it would have been an easy task to run the software also on FreeBSD based workstations - if the GPU could be used. Even the SoC platforms come with OpenCL support (also for the GPU) these days and i do not see anything useful on FreeBSD (except POCL for CPU usage, but no GPU). My contribution to 1st of April ... Oliver signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 5:24 AM, Jordan Hubbard j...@ixsystems.com wrote: On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:11 PM, Matt Olander m...@ixsystems.com wrote: This is like trying to predict automobile technology and dominant car-makers by 1905. There's always room for competition. Take a look at what's happening right now in the auto-industry. Tesla came out of nowhere 125 years after the invention of the automobile and is doing pretty well. I think you're kind of making my point for me, Matt. :-) Tesla benefitted entirely from deep pockets on the part of its investors. Over $160M went into starting the company, of which $70M came from the personal checking account of Elon Musk, the current visionary and CEO, and to quote the wikipedia page: Tesla Motors is a public company that trades on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol TSLA.[5] In the first quarter of 2013, Tesla posted profits for the first time in its ten year history. Yep, in other words, Tesla has been losing money for over 10 years and only just started turning a profit, after raising a mere $187M in investment and $485M in loans from the US DOE. Your tax dollars at work! On top of all that Tesla has only managed to make money at all by focusing exclusively the highest end of the luxury car market, where profit margins are also the highest (the first car, the roadster, would set you back $110,000). Getting back to computer operating systems, it would make most readers of these lists choke on their Doritos to know how much Apple had to invest in Mac OS X before it became a viable desktop operating system and of course you've already seen folks screaming about how Apple gear is too expensive and they'll never buy it. You just don't get a consumer-grade desktop Unix OS, or a practical all-electric sedan, without serious monetary investment and a luxury marquee to match, assuming you'd like to actually make any of that money *back*. So, back to BSD on the desktop. Anyone got a spare $200M they'd like to just throw away? That's what it's going to take! :) Don't believe me? Go ask someone who knows first-hand then. Ask Mark Shuttleworth: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/why-ubuntus-creator-still-invests-his-fortune-in-an-unprofitable-company/ Yeah, no doubt it will cost a bit of money to compete on that level. However, have you ever heard the phrase pioneers suffer where settlers prosper? Meaning it may (or may not!) take significantly less to compete once a lot of the harder problems are solved. If we take the fact that PCs are on the decline but device adoption is on the rise, perhaps we could focus on an Android competitor (*cough* Cyb0rg *cough). Wouldn't it be possible to run Android apps on *BSD via a java vm? I will get you an Ubuntu phone for Christmas and we can try it :P -matt P.S., I do not have 200 million but I'm good for 10k :P ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 06:40:18PM -0400, Garrett Wollman wrote: Hmmm. I'm a bit biased here, but I've been using FreeBSD on the desktop since, well, before it was called FreeBSD. It's still my primary platform for nearly everything (except photo management, which drove me to a Mac laptop so I could run Lightroom, and those few There are a few alternatives to Lightroom available in Ports Collection, you might want to give them a try one day. remaining Web sites that still bury all their content inside Flash). That's easy: Flash sites should be avoided. Most of them are using this technology for showing stupid ads anyway, not for something useful. I still recall a friend of mine actually *loved* that his iPhone does not support Flash: it essentially enabled (ad|spam)-free Web browsing (alas, those fuckers had caught up since then). But let's be clear that different people have different requirements for a desktop. My requirements are relatively simple: twm, xterm, XEmacs, vlc, LaTeX, xpdf, a Jabber client (psi), $VCS_OF_CHOICE, gnucash, and at least two Web browsers (I use Opera for most stuff and Firefox for promiscuous-mode browsing). [...] Other people have rather different requirements, and that's OK. But let's please not break the applications for which FreeBSD is very good now (and has actually gotten substantially better). Application availability does not, unfortunately, round up some perfect desktop. I fear that Linux-centric development of hardware drivers, X.org and all that shit is getting more and more divergent from FreeBSD, and soon enough we'll get the situation I haven't seen for some 15 years: we are again far behind on modern HW support. Power-saving techniques, most notably working sleep-resume and competitive batter life are also our weak points at the moment. I'd like to replace my old laptop (which runs 8.4-STABLE almost perfectly), but how far can I go with, say, recent MacBook Pro? ./danfe ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
No wifi. Someone has to step up and own broadcom wifi or this will never change. -a On 2 April 2014 18:44, Alexey Dokuchaev da...@nsu.ru wrote: On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 06:40:18PM -0400, Garrett Wollman wrote: Hmmm. I'm a bit biased here, but I've been using FreeBSD on the desktop since, well, before it was called FreeBSD. It's still my primary platform for nearly everything (except photo management, which drove me to a Mac laptop so I could run Lightroom, and those few There are a few alternatives to Lightroom available in Ports Collection, you might want to give them a try one day. remaining Web sites that still bury all their content inside Flash). That's easy: Flash sites should be avoided. Most of them are using this technology for showing stupid ads anyway, not for something useful. I still recall a friend of mine actually *loved* that his iPhone does not support Flash: it essentially enabled (ad|spam)-free Web browsing (alas, those fuckers had caught up since then). But let's be clear that different people have different requirements for a desktop. My requirements are relatively simple: twm, xterm, XEmacs, vlc, LaTeX, xpdf, a Jabber client (psi), $VCS_OF_CHOICE, gnucash, and at least two Web browsers (I use Opera for most stuff and Firefox for promiscuous-mode browsing). [...] Other people have rather different requirements, and that's OK. But let's please not break the applications for which FreeBSD is very good now (and has actually gotten substantially better). Application availability does not, unfortunately, round up some perfect desktop. I fear that Linux-centric development of hardware drivers, X.org and all that shit is getting more and more divergent from FreeBSD, and soon enough we'll get the situation I haven't seen for some 15 years: we are again far behind on modern HW support. Power-saving techniques, most notably working sleep-resume and competitive batter life are also our weak points at the moment. I'd like to replace my old laptop (which runs 8.4-STABLE almost perfectly), but how far can I go with, say, recent MacBook Pro? ./danfe ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Leaving the Desktop Market
Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely it’s that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: but you won't be able to use your graphics card? In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? Eitan Adler ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 4/1/14, 1:46 PM, Eitan Adler wrote: Hi all Hey it's not an apr 1 joke if it's true.. ___ freebsd-hack...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Hi, On 04/01/14 07:46, Eitan Adler wrote: Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. Can this be translated that the green is always better on the other side ? The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely it’s that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. I agree that there are usability issues with the sound framework in FreeBSD. I've seen this myself, for example trying to get sound using firefox, you now need pulseaudio and it must be configured correctly. I'm pretty sure there are people around in the FreeBSD project that are quite capable and could easily fix these issues, given some coordination and funding. Probably you should ask the FreeBSD foundation to fund a developer for a year or two to work on the desktop issues. Desktop is complicated. You need to understand that many device frameworks are designed entirely for other platforms, and I think that the current approach to compile Linux oriented code like HAL under FreeBSD is not always the right approach. We need to make our own HAL that is compatible with the Linux Applications, that need to know where the scanner or webcam is attached. Speaking about sound again, I think we need a tiny library and daemon that sits between /dev/dspX.X and the applications, that pulls together the most common audio libraries, like portaudio, pulseaudio and the KDE one, into a single and brand new solution. I did propose something at EuroBSDcon last year, that we can use character device emulation in user-space, cuse4bsd, to achieve this. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Did FreeBSD ever compete on the Desktop market? While touching this topic, I must say that I'm very grateful to all you port-guys that keep stuff compiling and working on the Desktop front. I've asked myself a few times during the last couple of years, who are the people really making my FreeBSD Desktop work? Did they receive enough thanks or funds for their work? Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? Because something does not work in FreeBSD it can prove an excellent opportunity for someone to fix it! Don't underestimate that! --HPS ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 1 Apr 2014, at 08:11, Jordan Hubbard j...@mail.turbofuzz.com wrote: 1. Power. As you point out, being truly power efficient is a complete top-to-bottom engineering effort and it takes a lot more than just trying to idle the processor whenever possible to achieve that. You need to optimize all of the hot-spot routines in the system for power efficiency (which actually involves a fair amount of micro architecture knowledge), you need a kernel scheduler that is power management aware, you need a process management system that runs as few things as possible and knows how to schedule things during package wake-up intervals, you need timers to be coalesced at the level where applications consume them, the list just goes on and on. It’s a lot of engineering work, and to drive that work you also need a lot of telemetry data and people with big sticks running around hitting people who write power-inefficient code. FreeBSD has neither. Just a small note here: Improving power management is something that the Core Team and the Foundation have jointly identified as an important goal, in particular for mobile / embedded scenarios. We're currently coordinating potential sponsors for the work and soliciting proposals from people interested in doing the work. If you know of anyone in either category then please drop either me, core, or the Foundation an email. Some things have already seen progress, for example Davide's calloutng work includes timer coalescing, but there are still a lot of, uh, opportunities for improvement. The Symbian EKA2 book has some very interesting detail on their power management infrastructure, which would be worth looking at for anyone interested in working on this, and I believe your former employer had some expertise in this area. Of course, no matter how good the base system becomes at power management, we still can't prevent stuff in ports running idle spinloops. We can, however, provide tools that encourage power-efficient design. For example, currently hald wakes up every 30 seconds and polls the optical drive if you have one. Why? Because there's no devd event when a CD is inserted, so the only way for it to get these notifications is polling. If you have a laptop with an optical drive, this is really bad for power usage. David ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 12:11:19PM +0500, Jordan Hubbard wrote: On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? The fact that this posting comes out on April 1st makes me wonder if it’s just an elaborate April Fool’s joke, but then the notion of *BSD (or Linux, for that matter) on the Desktop is just another long-running April fool’s joke, so I’m willing to postulate that two April Fools jokes would simply cancel each other out and make this posting a serious one again. :-) I’ll choose to be serious and say what I’m about to say in spite of the fact that I work for the primary sponsor of PC-BSD and actually like the fact that it has created some interesting technologies like PBIs, the Jail Warden, Life-preserver and a ZFS boot environment menu. There is no such thing as a desktop market for *BSD or Linux. There never has been and there never will be. Why do you think we chose “the power to serve” as FreeBSD’s first marketing slogan? It makes a fine server OS and it’s easy to defend its role in the server room. It’s also becoming easier to defend its role as an embedded OS, which is another excellent niche to pursue and I am happy to see all the recent developments there. A desktop? Unless you consider Mac OS X to be “BSD on the desktop” (and while they share some common technologies, it’s increasingly a stretch to say that), it’s just never going to happen for (at least) the following reasons: 1. Power. As you point out, being truly power efficient is a complete top-to-bottom engineering effort and it takes a lot more than just trying to idle the processor whenever possible to achieve that. You need to optimize all of the hot-spot routines in the system for power efficiency (which actually involves a fair amount of micro architecture knowledge), you need a kernel scheduler that is power management aware, you need a process management system that runs as few things as possible and knows how to schedule things during package wake-up intervals, you need timers to be coalesced at the level where applications consume them, the list just goes on and on. It’s a lot of engineering work, and to drive that work you also need a lot of telemetry data and people with big sticks running around hitting people who write power-inefficient code. FreeBSD has neither. 2. Multimedia. A real end-user’s desktop is basically one big UI for watching things, listening to things, and running apps. A decent audio / video subsystem is just one part of the picture, and one that has always been really weak - entire engineering teams can spend years working on codecs, performance optimizations, low and guaranteed latency support for audio I/O, etc. What’s worse, the bar is only being raised. You want to be part of the next wave of folks who can author and edit content for the new 4K video standard? Not on FreeBSD or Linux, you’re not. 3. Applications. A desktop without real and useful applications is not a desktop, it’s just an empty display surface. Sure, there are users out there who are happy with just a mail client, a web browser and maybe a calendaring app, but those users are also arguably even better candidates for Chrome or other simplified environments where all of that simply happens in a fancy web browser and you get things like “software updates” and cloud integration essentially for free since it’s all just one cohesive picture there. The ability to solve those user’s needs very simply makes them ripe targets for the web application delivery platforms. For the other folks who want to do fancier stuff like mix audio, edit videos or even just play mainstream 3D games that were actually published sometime in the last year, they’ll use a real desktop OS and won't even bother looking at one of the free ones because guess what, the free ones just can’t do those things, or do them badly enough that their users feel like they’re perpetually living in a kind of self-selected ghetto. Metaphorically speaking, sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag in your one-room apartment is fine when you’re young, but as you get older, you want to be more comfortable and have a real bed in a real house! Those are just three reasons. There are lots more, not least of which among them is the fact that it’s damn hard even just to *create* significant applications with the weak-ass APIs that *BSD and Linux provide. You have to stitch together some Frankenstein collection of libraries out of ports (or linux packages) and then hope the whole
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Hice April 1st piece, Let's see what I could contribute :) On 01.04.14 08:46, Eitan Adler wrote: Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. There is no platform that can do everything as you please. In fact, there can't be any such thing with computers, because they are not humans and only do what we humans instruct (program) them to do, not what we believe we programmed them to do. A slight difference, but important to see things in perspective. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely it’s that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Who said we can't? We did, do and will do that. On a case by case solution. This is strictly hardware specific issue and of course, no other OS can claim good power management on any hardware. Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. Lack of documentation has always been the weak part of any enthusiast work. For people care more about getting the work done, than writing long essays. I would not go that far to say you can't switch audio outputs in a middle of a song (or why not, a movie?). After all, this is strictly hardware specific issue and of course, no other OS can claim good audio management on any hardware. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: but you won't be able to use your graphics card? Purchasing specialized hardware (a laptop), without being aware what software will drive it is always a very bad idea. As for those vendor's proprietary technologies, they don't function on many other modern platforms, not only FreeBSD. Then, there is choice -- you could use other vendor's technologies, if that suits you. Or, if (say) CUDA requires OS XYZ, use that instead of FreeBSD. Not that this has anything to do with desktop. In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. If you will remember, most of this is because of different licensing restrictions imposed by those vendors. I am absolutely confident, Adobe will produce a very good Flash Player for FreeBSD, once you convince them there is money in that. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. FreeBSD is not sold. There is no such thing as market for FreeBSD. Neither in Desktop, Server or whatever other arbitrary segments. In fact, FreeBSD is not even a product -- it is more of a toolkit, which you use to build your very own OS for your very own segment. Yes, 2014 might very well turn out to be the year of Linux, but that is not because of FreeBSD -- Microsoft are helping much more with their insistence to kill Windows XP. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? You mean, all those short lived species will arrive in hordes and destroy the Dragon? Might be, might be not. The dragon has seen thousands of those already come and go. Having fun is most important in the process. :) Daniel ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 4/1/2014 1:46 AM, Eitan Adler wrote: Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely it’s that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: but you won't be able to use your graphics card? In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? I don't know much about BSD on the desktop, but it's somewhere I'd like to go eventually. This comment caught me off, however. The fact that there are thousands of flavors of Linux vs one flavor of a BSD desktop is sort of irrelivant--it could be applied, by that same method to BSD as a server. there are hundreds of Linux distributions that can be used as a server, so by your logic, how do hundreds of Linux servers stand up to 3 flavors of BSD? I switched to BSD for a few reasons: 1) The documentation is amazing. As with any project, it can be improved as was mentioned in the most recent BSDNow, but the only other close call I can see is maybe Archlinux, and I don't want that on a server. 2) The ports and PKGNG system is beyond amazing. 3) The organization is more amazing. Everything is incredibly intuitive. I love the customization, flexability and organization of BSD. 4) I didn't care until rather recently, but anything that lets me rely less and less on GNU and the GPL is a bonus. Given this, I commend everyone who has put hundreds of hours of work into making BSD a desktop system. Rather than suggest that BSD stays merely a server OS, why not pose these issues as problems or milestones. Perhaps sound has some drawbacks, but when the day arrives when it is up to par, I can almost guarantee if the BSD ideals remain the same that it'll be so much easier and cleaner to use than pulse/alsa, etc. Eitan Adler ___ freebsd-hack...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org -- Take care, Ty http://tds-solutions.net He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave. ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? The fact that this posting comes out on April 1st makes me wonder if it’s just an elaborate April Fool’s joke, but then the notion of *BSD (or Linux, for that matter) on the Desktop is just another long-running April fool’s joke, so I’m willing to postulate that two April Fools jokes would simply cancel each other out and make this posting a serious one again. :-) I’ll choose to be serious and say what I’m about to say in spite of the fact that I work for the primary sponsor of PC-BSD and actually like the fact that it has created some interesting technologies like PBIs, the Jail Warden, Life-preserver and a ZFS boot environment menu. There is no such thing as a desktop market for *BSD or Linux. There never has been and there never will be. Why do you think we chose “the power to serve” as FreeBSD’s first marketing slogan? It makes a fine server OS and it’s easy to defend its role in the server room. It’s also becoming easier to defend its role as an embedded OS, which is another excellent niche to pursue and I am happy to see all the recent developments there. A desktop? Unless you consider Mac OS X to be “BSD on the desktop” (and while they share some common technologies, it’s increasingly a stretch to say that), it’s just never going to happen for (at least) the following reasons: 1. Power. As you point out, being truly power efficient is a complete top-to-bottom engineering effort and it takes a lot more than just trying to idle the processor whenever possible to achieve that. You need to optimize all of the hot-spot routines in the system for power efficiency (which actually involves a fair amount of micro architecture knowledge), you need a kernel scheduler that is power management aware, you need a process management system that runs as few things as possible and knows how to schedule things during package wake-up intervals, you need timers to be coalesced at the level where applications consume them, the list just goes on and on. It’s a lot of engineering work, and to drive that work you also need a lot of telemetry data and people with big sticks running around hitting people who write power-inefficient code. FreeBSD has neither. 2. Multimedia. A real end-user’s desktop is basically one big UI for watching things, listening to things, and running apps. A decent audio / video subsystem is just one part of the picture, and one that has always been really weak - entire engineering teams can spend years working on codecs, performance optimizations, low and guaranteed latency support for audio I/O, etc. What’s worse, the bar is only being raised. You want to be part of the next wave of folks who can author and edit content for the new 4K video standard? Not on FreeBSD or Linux, you’re not. 3. Applications. A desktop without real and useful applications is not a desktop, it’s just an empty display surface. Sure, there are users out there who are happy with just a mail client, a web browser and maybe a calendaring app, but those users are also arguably even better candidates for Chrome or other simplified environments where all of that simply happens in a fancy web browser and you get things like “software updates” and cloud integration essentially for free since it’s all just one cohesive picture there. The ability to solve those user’s needs very simply makes them ripe targets for the web application delivery platforms. For the other folks who want to do fancier stuff like mix audio, edit videos or even just play mainstream 3D games that were actually published sometime in the last year, they’ll use a real desktop OS and won't even bother looking at one of the free ones because guess what, the free ones just can’t do those things, or do them badly enough that their users feel like they’re perpetually living in a kind of self-selected ghetto. Metaphorically speaking, sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag in your one-room apartment is fine when you’re young, but as you get older, you want to be more comfortable and have a real bed in a real house! Those are just three reasons. There are lots more, not least of which among them is the fact that it’s damn hard even just to *create* significant applications with the weak-ass APIs that *BSD and Linux provide. You have to stitch together some Frankenstein collection of libraries out of ports (or linux packages) and then hope the whole pile of multi-“vendor bits will sort of work together, which of course they rarely do because they
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Mon, 2014-03-31 at 22:46 -0700, Eitan Adler wrote: Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely it’s that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: but you won't be able to use your graphics card? In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? Why even bother? Its over, just embrace the future and be like this happy Mac user: http://people.freebsd.org/~sbruno/happy_desktop_user.jpg sean ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: Leaving the Desktop Market
-Original Message- From: Eitan Adler [mailto:li...@eitanadler.com] Sent: Monday, March 31, 2014 10:47 PM To: hack...@freebsd.org; curr...@freebsd.org; freebsd- advoc...@freebsd.org Subject: Leaving the Desktop Market Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely it’s that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: but you won't be able to use your graphics card? In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? Eitan, While I understand your frustration, VICOR is using FreeBSD as a Desktop since FreeBSD 2.2. We don't use sound and we are fine relying on vesa. While I understand that the things you listed are actual short-comings for normal Desktop users, I think it's the wrong decision to say that we should be backing out *any* functionality that would make the Desktop any more difficult to produce. As it stands, it would take me weeks just to count the number of workstations that are running a GUI, rely on one of the existing video drivers (nv, radeon, mach64, etc.) and use lots of Desktop ports. -- Devin _ The information contained in this message is proprietary and/or confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, please: (i) delete the message and all copies; (ii) do not disclose, distribute or use the message in any manner; and (iii) notify the sender immediately. In addition, please be aware that any message addressed to our domain is subject to archiving and review by persons other than the intended recipient. Thank you. ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: Leaving the Desktop Market
-Original Message- From: Lars Engels [mailto:lars.eng...@0x20.net] Sent: Tuesday, April 1, 2014 2:41 AM To: Jordan Hubbard Cc: Eitan Adler; hack...@freebsd.org; curr...@freebsd.org; freebsd- advoc...@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Leaving the Desktop Market On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 12:11:19PM +0500, Jordan Hubbard wrote: On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the [snip] I'm a happy FreeBSD desktop user since 4.7. There are some edges, but I really like that I can can create a desktop the way _I_ want it and my mail client even allows me to break lines at 80 chars. Eat that, Apple Mail! ;-) What e-mail client do you use? Evolution? -- Devin _ The information contained in this message is proprietary and/or confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, please: (i) delete the message and all copies; (ii) do not disclose, distribute or use the message in any manner; and (iii) notify the sender immediately. In addition, please be aware that any message addressed to our domain is subject to archiving and review by persons other than the intended recipient. Thank you. ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
You got me for a moment :) On a serious note... OpenBSD is reportedly having some success on a desktop- is using -CURRENT on dev's desktop religiously (so I've heard) something related? (e.g. working sound out of the box) I have sound with www/firefox without pulseaudio, albeit firefox 28 segfaults from time to time (see gecko@ if really interested). My desktop experience from few years on -CURRENT/STABLE- with stable/sane configuration that's working it's a bliss, however when something goes awry... Few hours of frustration almost guaranteed. And sometimes it goes that way due to some update unfortunately. -- View this message in context: http://freebsd.1045724.n5.nabble.com/Leaving-the-Desktop-Market-tp5899597p5899727.html Sent from the freebsd-current mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Mon, March 31, 2014 10:46 pm, Eitan Adler wrote: Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: itâs almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely itâs that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: but you won't be able to use your graphics card? In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? Eitan Adler ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org Hi, I don't understand the gripe about sound. OSS works well. If you install the verson in ports, audio/oss, you get a more elaborate set of tools. (you can use the tools with the OSS drivers in base, its possible to remove the base OSS system and *only* use the updated OSS system however there are some caveats that may cause serious issues with a 'user', if you don't want to get your hands dirty don't mess with that.) Anyhow, last I went through a few month period of experimenting with sound and picked up a bunch of hardware on ebay, different cards from various vendors, ie asus, creative, etc. Its possible and not too difficult to have four or five cards on the machine and use them simultaneously. I didn't notice any problem switching from speakers to headphones while music is playing. Maybe this works on other operating systems, i haven't tried. The thing about sound, the card is a digital-to-analog converter, and vice-versa. It uses PCM data. (PCM was actually first 'invented' in the 1800's - no fools joke). Digital audio/Sound has never really gotten better, it has only gotten cheaper. -- Waitman Gobble San Jose California USA +1.510-830-7975 ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. Ha, ha, ha. Reminds me of the long running 04-01 gag stating that kernel.org ran on FreeBSD. As to Leaving the Desktop Market; +1. OK by me. OTOH The following /will/ give you everything you /claim/ isn't /currently/ possible. x11/xorg-minimal x11-wm/xfce4 audio/aquqlung multimedia/vlc The above list also gives you the ability to switch output(s) on the fly (via mixer). exotic video card? emulators/linux_base-f10 x11/nvidia-driver --Chris P.S. Happy April fools to you, too. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: it’s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely it’s that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: but you won't be able to use your graphics card? In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? Eitan Adler ___ freebsd-hack...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Fwd: Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Sorry, should have replied to everybody ;) Cheers -- Forwarded Message -- Subject: Re: Leaving the Desktop Market Date: Tuesday 01 April 2014, 17:34:28 From: Stefan Wendler stefan.wend...@tngtech.com To: freebsd-hack...@freebsd.org Hi, On Monday 31 March 2014 22:46:45 Eitan Adler wrote: Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. I don't know the posts you are talking about. I'm using FreeBSD as a server since Version 7. Since FreeBSD 9 I'm also using it as main notebook OS. With everything you can imagine: sound, flash, 3D gfx, eve online via wine rocks, printing, scanning, you name it. Yes, FreeBSD has some rough edges. But after over 18 years of Linux I can say, Linux has enough rough edges and depending on the current needs I more than freaked out once with each distro. And I still am freaking out on a daily basis as a *nix admin when one of the Linux's shows their true face. Like undocumented autoupgrading that messes up your whole ovirt-cluster. I never had that with a BSD. But what there is to learn is, I only ever had problems with consumer/cheap hardware. Most Linux Distros suck at least one way. For me the only Distro that really made me happy for over 14 years was Gentoo. In a way FreeBSD is similar but much much cleaner and sorted. It may be that FreeBSD is not for you and you are more the Linux Mint/*buntu user. But it would be a nightmare for me, if the good FreeBSD folks would stop supporting X-stuff. I even give to the FreeBSD Foundation on a monthly basis with the wish to further support the desktop. FreeBSD is quite simple once you get the hang of it. But you have to be the person that likes to dig in sometimes. Currently it runs as smooth as butter here. When learning to use Gentoo for example I had not only one sleepless night where I had to fix broken libc upgrades without the ability to google that. But this is how we learn. With FreeBSD you have at least a running base system even if you mess up big time. Delete /usr/local/* but keep your /usr/local/etc and start over ... try that with Linux. No chance! I can go on here ;) The big lag of FreeBSD is indeed vendor support. But it won't get better if we drop support for stuff. I'm sorry FreeBSD is such an upsetting experience for you. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? ... PCBSD stands out in that it is a really nice experience and people from the Linux world are asking about it and it just plain works mostly out of the box like a ubuntu or mint does, on hardware that is not no-name. And there is always GhostBSD (http://www.ghostbsd.org/) ... so there are two flavours already ;) The base system is still FreeBSD but I don't think that this is a problem. Ever fu**d around with getting the right packages in the right versions of some tools for example SuSE, CentOS, Debian, or whatever without freaking out? The different approaches in packaging systems on Linux is a mess as well. PCBSD is not for me though. But not that is isn't working but it is not for me as a BSD user as Ubuntu never was for me as a Linux/Gentoo user. Linux is not the silver bullet. And in every Linux forum there are always people that complain about why Linux or this or that distro sucks and why they move on. And even Linux wouldn't be what it is without the various BSDs. Cheers, Stefan P.S. One thing they could upgrade though is the linuxulator. ___ freebsd-hack...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org - ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Apr 1, 2014, at 6:57 AM, Sean Bruno sean...@yahoo-inc.com wrote: Why even bother? Its over, just embrace the future and be like this happy Mac user: http://people.freebsd.org/~sbruno/happy_desktop_user.jpg I have Macs at work (typing on one now), and a mac at home. I like them. I recently installed FreeBSD 10 on an Intel i5 NUC. 16GB ram, and a 120GB m-SATA SSD. I put a nice keyboard and an old 19” Dell monitor on it, used vidconsole to make the screen green on black, and a decent resolution. It’s just like being back in the 80s, when Unix had a desktop market, only much, much faster. ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 2014-04-01 03:11, Jordan Hubbard wrote: 1. Power. As you point out, being truly power efficient is a complete top-to-bottom engineering effort and it takes a lot more than just trying to idle the processor whenever possible to achieve that. You need to optimize all of the hot-spot routines in the system for power efficiency (which actually involves a fair amount of micro architecture knowledge), you need a kernel scheduler that is power management aware, you need a process management system that runs as few things as possible and knows how to schedule things during package wake-up intervals, you need timers to be coalesced at the level where applications consume them, the list just goes on and on. It’s a lot of engineering work, and to drive that work you also need a lot of telemetry data and people with big sticks running around hitting people who write power-inefficient code. FreeBSD has neither. There is some advantage to focusing on power in the Server and Embedded space. Saving power in a rack full of machines would be a very big win, and it could be especially important in embedded. As Jordan mentions, a kernel scheduler that is aware of power management could do big things here. It may also be able to provide a performance boost, Intel's TurboBoost feature is controlled via power management, and only lights off under specific circumstances, unlocking that extra performance at key times may also be a big win. - Jordan ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org -- Allan Jude signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
RE: Leaving the Desktop Market
-Original Message- From: owner-freebsd-advoc...@freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-advoc...@freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Randi Harper You know you opened a can of worms with that one. Because all the nerds are going to step up and say Well, I run FreeBSD on my desktop! It's totally viable! Dear nerds, get some perspective. You aren't an end user, and you're masochistic. It's okay, we accept you here. But your individual use case doesn't indicate a place in the market. Your basement isn't a market. It's a basement. Your small company isn't a market. It's a small company. Many companies combined create a market. Why aren't all the nerds and small businesses out there a market? I'm no marketing expert or anything, but it would seem that there is some kind of market out there that isn't being catered to. I may be a masochist, but I refuse to have to pay Apples prices for their hardware. They just seem insane to me. If they ever decided to sell OS X for non-Apple hardware I might use it. And just for the record I've been using FreeBSD as an exclusive home desktop since 1999. At work now so however Outlook mangles this is my fault :) Rod Person Programmer (412)454-2616 Just because it can been done, does not mean it should be done. ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 07:52:13AM -0700, dte...@freebsd.org wrote: -Original Message- From: Lars Engels [mailto:lars.eng...@0x20.net] Sent: Tuesday, April 1, 2014 2:41 AM To: Jordan Hubbard Cc: Eitan Adler; hack...@freebsd.org; curr...@freebsd.org; freebsd- advoc...@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Leaving the Desktop Market On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 12:11:19PM +0500, Jordan Hubbard wrote: On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the [snip] I'm a happy FreeBSD desktop user since 4.7. There are some edges, but I really like that I can can create a desktop the way _I_ want it and my mail client even allows me to break lines at 80 chars. Eat that, Apple Mail! ;-) What e-mail client do you use? Evolution? No, mutt, with vim as mail composer. :) pgpSJwTsqAsgD.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Mon, March 31, 2014 10:46 pm, Eitan Adler wrote: Hi all, Some of you may have seen my posts entitled Story of a Laptop User and Story of a Desktop User. For those of you who did not, it can be a worthwhile read to see what life is like when using FreeBSD as a desktop. In short, it is an educational experience. While FreeBSD can be coerced to do the right thing, it is rarely there by default and often doesn't work as well as we would expect. The following are issues I haven't brought up in the past: Battery life sucks: itâ�s almost as if powerd wasn't running. Windows can run for five hours on my laptop while FreeBSD can barely make it two hours. I wonder what the key differences are? Likely itâ�s that we focus so much on performance that no one considers power. ChromeOS can run for 12 hours on some hardware; why can't we make FreeBSD run for 16? Sound configuration lacks key documentation: how can I automatically change between headphones and external speakers? You can't even do that in middle of a song at all! Trust me that you never want to be staring at an HDA pin configuration. I'll bet you couldn't even get sound streaming to other machines working if you tried. FreeBSD lacks vendor credibility: CUDA is unsupported. Dropbox hasn't released a client for FreeBSD. Nvidia Optimus doesn't function on FreeBSD. Can you imagine telling someone to purchase a laptop with the caveat: but you won't be able to use your graphics card? In any case, half of our desktop support is emulation: flash and opera only works because of the linuxulator. There really isn't any reason for vendors to bother supporting FreeBSD if we are just going to ape Linux anyways. That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? Eitan Adler ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org Hi, I don't understand the gripe about sound. OSS works well. If you install the verson in ports, audio/oss, you get a more elaborate set of tools. ---8--- The thing about sound, the card is a digital-to-analog converter, and vice-versa. It uses PCM data. (PCM was actually first 'invented' in the 1800's - no fools joke). Digital audio/Sound has never really gotten better, it has only gotten cheaper. WOW. That an interesting bit of historical information. Thanks for sharing it! --Chris -- Waitman Gobble San Jose California USA +1.510-830-7975 ___ freebsd-hack...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 12:11 AM, Jordan Hubbard j...@mail.turbofuzz.com wrote: On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? The fact that this posting comes out on April 1st makes me wonder if it's just an elaborate April Fool's joke, but then the notion of *BSD (or Linux, for that matter) on the Desktop is just another long-running April fool's joke, so I'm willing to postulate that two April Fools jokes would simply cancel each other out and make this posting a serious one again. :-) I'll choose to be serious and say what I'm about to say in spite of the fact that I work for the primary sponsor of PC-BSD and actually like the fact that it has created some interesting technologies like PBIs, the Jail Warden, Life-preserver and a ZFS boot environment menu. There is no such thing as a desktop market for *BSD or Linux. There never has been and there never will be. Why do you think we chose the power to serve as FreeBSD's first marketing slogan? It makes a fine server OS and it's easy to defend its role in the server room. It's also becoming easier to defend its role as an embedded OS, which is another excellent niche to pursue and I am happy to see all the recent developments there. A desktop? Unless you consider Mac OS X to be BSD on the desktop (and while they share some common technologies, it's increasingly a stretch to say that), it's just never going to happen for (at least) the following reasons: As you may imagine, I completely disagree! The Internet just had it's 20th birthday (it can't even drink yet!) and it's anyone's game. This is like trying to predict automobile technology and dominant car-makers by 1905. There's always room for competition. Take a look at what's happening right now in the auto-industry. Tesla came out of nowhere 125 years after the invention of the automobile and is doing pretty well. I bet there were a lot of people at Apple saying they couldn't compete in the music-player market, or the mobile-phone market, etc. In fact, if I look at the stats on freenas.org, we have about 350k visitors each month, with nearly 2% of them running FreeBSD and clearly using it to surf the internet. Sounds like a market to me! Long live the FreeBSD desktop, long live PC-BSD :P Cheers, -matt ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Matt Olander m...@ixsystems.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 12:11 AM, Jordan Hubbard j...@mail.turbofuzz.com wrote: On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? The fact that this posting comes out on April 1st makes me wonder if it's just an elaborate April Fool's joke, but then the notion of *BSD (or Linux, for that matter) on the Desktop is just another long-running April fool's joke, so I'm willing to postulate that two April Fools jokes would simply cancel each other out and make this posting a serious one again. :-) I'll choose to be serious and say what I'm about to say in spite of the fact that I work for the primary sponsor of PC-BSD and actually like the fact that it has created some interesting technologies like PBIs, the Jail Warden, Life-preserver and a ZFS boot environment menu. There is no such thing as a desktop market for *BSD or Linux. There never has been and there never will be. Why do you think we chose the power to serve as FreeBSD's first marketing slogan? It makes a fine server OS and it's easy to defend its role in the server room. It's also becoming easier to defend its role as an embedded OS, which is another excellent niche to pursue and I am happy to see all the recent developments there. A desktop? Unless you consider Mac OS X to be BSD on the desktop (and while they share some common technologies, it's increasingly a stretch to say that), it's just never going to happen for (at least) the following reasons: As you may imagine, I completely disagree! The Internet just had it's 20th birthday (it can't even drink yet!) and it's anyone's game. This is like trying to predict automobile technology and dominant car-makers by 1905. There's always room for competition. Take a look at what's happening right now in the auto-industry. Tesla came out of nowhere 125 years after the invention of the automobile and is doing pretty well. I bet there were a lot of people at Apple saying they couldn't compete in the music-player market, or the mobile-phone market, etc. In fact, if I look at the stats on freenas.org, we have about 350k visitors each month, with nearly 2% of them running FreeBSD and clearly using it to surf the internet. Sounds like a market to me! Seeing this I could not resist: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/which-operating-system Long live the FreeBSD desktop, long live PC-BSD :P Let them prosper! Seriously, though. There are shortcomings, sure. But I tend to prefer the rock solid feature rich base with a somewhat shaky desktop experience than the other alternatives. Sure I would like to see a FreeBSD pulseaudio compatible sound server. And perhaps a template library for pinout configs for snd-cards. And native flash, although I say flash, no thank you Perhaps companies such as Netflix could release FreeBSD clients ahead of linux clients ;) I can also say that I recently got a friend to migrate from linux on both his home server as well as his laptop. He is very happy with the change. Cheers Andreas Cheers, -matt ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
Hi all, I have been a member of the FreeBSD hackers mailing list for about a year.5 now and I must say that I was looking forward to this year's 4/1 email. Last year, I didn't even realize that the discussion of promoting i386 as a tier 1 architecture was a joke until someone blatantly mentioned in... To address the actual content of this thread, personally, I absolutely love the FreeBSD os and the community that supports it. However, even as a third year computer engineering student, I still have not overcome the overhead that comes with becoming familiar with the UNIX environment. Of course, that is mostly attributed to my laziness and my unwillingness to sit through an entire reading of documentation... To share an observation, I am a teaching assistant for a freshman C programming class and I recently set up three FreeBSD servers, one for each section, where students could learn to develop C programs in an actual UNIX environment. Here is the lecture that I wrote up to help them learn the basics: http://vecr.ece.villanova.edu/bk/fc/labs/docs/ece1620-l2unix.pdf. I led the first section yesterday and I have to say that it was an utter disaster. Only about 1/8th of the class showed even an ounce of interest in this stuff (as it was something extra and not required for the course) and I really f'ed up by trying to teach them how to use vi... Long live the BSD community! On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 2:59 PM, Andreas Nilsson andrn...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Matt Olander m...@ixsystems.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 12:11 AM, Jordan Hubbard j...@mail.turbofuzz.com wrote: On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? The fact that this posting comes out on April 1st makes me wonder if it's just an elaborate April Fool's joke, but then the notion of *BSD (or Linux, for that matter) on the Desktop is just another long-running April fool's joke, so I'm willing to postulate that two April Fools jokes would simply cancel each other out and make this posting a serious one again. :-) I'll choose to be serious and say what I'm about to say in spite of the fact that I work for the primary sponsor of PC-BSD and actually like the fact that it has created some interesting technologies like PBIs, the Jail Warden, Life-preserver and a ZFS boot environment menu. There is no such thing as a desktop market for *BSD or Linux. There never has been and there never will be. Why do you think we chose the power to serve as FreeBSD's first marketing slogan? It makes a fine server OS and it's easy to defend its role in the server room. It's also becoming easier to defend its role as an embedded OS, which is another excellent niche to pursue and I am happy to see all the recent developments there. A desktop? Unless you consider Mac OS X to be BSD on the desktop (and while they share some common technologies, it's increasingly a stretch to say that), it's just never going to happen for (at least) the following reasons: As you may imagine, I completely disagree! The Internet just had it's 20th birthday (it can't even drink yet!) and it's anyone's game. This is like trying to predict automobile technology and dominant car-makers by 1905. There's always room for competition. Take a look at what's happening right now in the auto-industry. Tesla came out of nowhere 125 years after the invention of the automobile and is doing pretty well. I bet there were a lot of people at Apple saying they couldn't compete in the music-player market, or the mobile-phone market, etc. In fact, if I look at the stats on freenas.org, we have about 350k visitors each month, with nearly 2% of them running FreeBSD and clearly using it to surf the internet. Sounds like a market to me! Seeing this I could not resist: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/which-operating-system Long live the FreeBSD desktop, long live PC-BSD :P Let them prosper! Seriously, though. There are shortcomings, sure. But I tend to prefer the rock solid feature rich base with a somewhat shaky desktop experience than the other alternatives. Sure I would like to see a FreeBSD pulseaudio compatible sound server. And perhaps a template library for pinout configs for snd-cards. And native flash, although I say flash, no thank you Perhaps companies such as Netflix could release FreeBSD clients ahead of linux clients ;) I can also say that I recently got a friend to migrate from linux on both his home server as
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Tue, April 1, 2014 11:59 am, Andreas Nilsson wrote: On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Matt Olander m...@ixsystems.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 12:11 AM, Jordan Hubbard j...@mail.turbofuzz.com wrote: On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the Linux desktop and start to rip out the pieces of the OS not needed for server or embedded use. Some of you may point to PCBSD and say that we have a chance, but I must ask you: how does one flavor stand up to the thousands in the Linux world? The fact that this posting comes out on April 1st makes me wonder if it's just an elaborate April Fool's joke, but then the notion of *BSD (or Linux, for that matter) on the Desktop is just another long-running April fool's joke, so I'm willing to postulate that two April Fools jokes would simply cancel each other out and make this posting a serious one again. :-) I'll choose to be serious and say what I'm about to say in spite of the fact that I work for the primary sponsor of PC-BSD and actually like the fact that it has created some interesting technologies like PBIs, the Jail Warden, Life-preserver and a ZFS boot environment menu. There is no such thing as a desktop market for *BSD or Linux. There never has been and there never will be. Why do you think we chose the power to serve as FreeBSD's first marketing slogan? It makes a fine server OS and it's easy to defend its role in the server room. It's also becoming easier to defend its role as an embedded OS, which is another excellent niche to pursue and I am happy to see all the recent developments there. A desktop? Unless you consider Mac OS X to be BSD on the desktop (and while they share some common technologies, it's increasingly a stretch to say that), it's just never going to happen for (at least) the following reasons: As you may imagine, I completely disagree! The Internet just had it's 20th birthday (it can't even drink yet!) and it's anyone's game. This is like trying to predict automobile technology and dominant car-makers by 1905. There's always room for competition. Take a look at what's happening right now in the auto-industry. Tesla came out of nowhere 125 years after the invention of the automobile and is doing pretty well. I bet there were a lot of people at Apple saying they couldn't compete in the music-player market, or the mobile-phone market, etc. In fact, if I look at the stats on freenas.org, we have about 350k visitors each month, with nearly 2% of them running FreeBSD and clearly using it to surf the internet. Sounds like a market to me! Seeing this I could not resist: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/which-operating-system Long live the FreeBSD desktop, long live PC-BSD :P Let them prosper! Seriously, though. There are shortcomings, sure. But I tend to prefer the rock solid feature rich base with a somewhat shaky desktop experience than the other alternatives. Sure I would like to see a FreeBSD pulseaudio compatible sound server. And perhaps a template library for pinout configs for snd-cards. And native flash, although I say flash, no thank you Perhaps companies such as Netflix could release FreeBSD clients ahead of linux clients ;) I can also say that I recently got a friend to migrate from linux on both his home server as well as his laptop. He is very happy with the change. Cheers Andreas Cheers, -matt ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org re pulseaudio: I've had luck reading the raw PCM data from the /dev/dsp* devices, storing in postgres (bytea), then later playing back to /dev/dsp.. 'streaming' to another system (maybe pgsql as el intermedio?) would be pretty simple. In this scenario there is no Alsa requirement, which works for me :) -- Waitman Gobble San Jose California USA +1.510-830-7975 ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: Leaving the Desktop Market
-Original Message- From: owner-freebsd-advoc...@freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-advoc...@freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Randi Harper You know you opened a can of worms with that one. Because all the nerds are going to step up and say Well, I run FreeBSD on my desktop! It's totally viable! Dear nerds, get some perspective. You aren't an end user, and you're masochistic. It's okay, we accept you here. But your individual use case doesn't indicate a place in the market. Your basement isn't a market. It's a basement. Your small company isn't a market. It's a small company. Many companies combined create a market. Why aren't all the nerds and small businesses out there a market? I'm no marketing expert or anything, but it would seem that there is some kind of market out there that isn't being catered to. I may be a masochist, but I refuse to have to pay Apples prices for their hardware. They just seem insane to me. If they ever decided to sell OS X for non-Apple hardware I might use it. OK. Now that I opened my big fat mouth, and made the mistake of involving myself earlier in this post before finishing my first of coffee. I'm already committed, so here goes... Can we take a look at advocacy for a moment? What defines it exactly? Is there better advocacy than another? What's the best advocacy? Is it contributing more $$ to the foundation? Is it contributing lines of code to the project? Is it putting a textual, or graphical link the Power to Serve on your web page? Is it telling everyone you know about how great FreeBSD is? I don't know. But just the other day, as I struggled with the [apparent] direction(s) FreeBSD was taking in the past few months. I began to reflect on the ~25yrs. of working with the code, and then (*)BSD itself. I realized that I spent no less than 75% of my waking hours in front of the tty. Almost all of which, was in some way related to FreeBSD. Much of it, was dedicated to installs. I calculate to this day, I have performed some 36,000 installs. At least 28,000 still running. Then it occurred to me; if that isn't the BEST form of advocacy, I don't know what is. Really. Think about it. So say what you will. Condemn, or patronize the misfits of society, the geeks, or geeky people. But know this; if it weren't for them, FreeBSD wouldn't be but some pie-in-the-sky ideal/dream. In some far away thought, or dream. For the record; I /don't/ live in my basement. I /do/ take showers. I own my home outright (2nd one, for the record). What's more, my current one was a complete renovation, which I performed myself. Masochistic? Maybe, but somebody has to pay the price, so others can reap the luxury. No? --Chris out... And just for the record I've been using FreeBSD as an exclusive home desktop since 1999. At work now so however Outlook mangles this is my fault :) Rod Person Programmer (412)454-2616 Just because it can been done, does not mean it should be done. ___ freebsd-hack...@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
El día Tuesday, April 01, 2014 a las 07:43:02PM +0200, Lars Engels escribió: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the [snip] I'm a happy FreeBSD desktop user since 4.7. There are some edges, but I really like that I can can create a desktop the way _I_ want it and my mail client even allows me to break lines at 80 chars. Eat that, Apple Mail! ;-) What e-mail client do you use? Evolution? No, mutt, with vim as mail composer. :) +1 matthias (FreeBSD since 2.2.5 and sending this from an EeePC 900, netbook, UMTS connected, KDE4 desktop, sound, webcam, vim, mutt, sendmail, ...) -- Sent from my FreeBSD netbook Matthias Apitz, g...@unixarea.de, http://www.unixarea.de/ f: +49-170-4527211 UNIX since V7 on PDP-11, UNIX on mainframe since ESER 1055 (IBM /370) UNIX on x86 since SVR4.2 UnixWare 2.1.2, FreeBSD since 2.2.5 ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 04/01/2014 07:46, dte...@freebsd.org wrote: Eitan, While I understand your frustration, VICOR is using FreeBSD as a Desktop since FreeBSD 2.2. We don't use sound and we are fine relying on vesa. While I understand that the things you listed are actual short-comings for normal Desktop users, I think it's the wrong decision to say that we should be backing out *any* functionality that would make the Desktop any more difficult to produce. As it stands, it would take me weeks just to count the number of workstations that are running a GUI, rely on one of the existing video drivers (nv, radeon, mach64, etc.) and use lots of Desktop ports. I have three FreeBSD desktops (one at work, one at home-office, and one for the usual messing around). They're all running 9.2, with Windows for Unix(TM)...uh, I mean KDE v4.12.3 as the GUI. Yes, I actually like KDE. I also have a machine at home running Debian Wheezy, also with KDE, and I have 2-3 mac devices that actually run MacOS (I have a few mac minis that run Free- and OpenBSD). The minis work exceptionally well as FreeBSD workstations. Each of the FreeBSD systems I have is my go-to workstation--it's where I do most of my work. Only if I can't do something (or don't want to run it on FreeBSD--e.g. Flash), do I use the Mac. The Debian box I just use for messing around--nothing serious. My home FreeBSD workstation has perfect sound, excellent graphics (nvidia), and I can even watch a lot of video using Firefox, since video is increasingly becoming HTML5-based. For me it just works. The whole combination that makes up my environment can be challenging to keep up-to-date, but it's getting a lot easier with pkgng and portmaster. I would hate to see this stuff, which I find very useful, and helps me both at work and home, to be ripped out of the OS. I have been using FreeBSD on the desktop since 1997, when I had two workstations on my desk (FreeBSD and RedHat) and I let them duke it out to see who would win. FreeBSD won then, and even though I continue to keep a Linux desktop around for fun, FreeBSD still wins on the basis of usability, stability, security, etc. michael PS. My current KDE wallpaper for my work office machine is the Windows XP green hillside with blue sky background. It's giving people fits here. ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 12:50 PM, Matthias Apitz g...@unixarea.de wrote: El día Tuesday, April 01, 2014 a las 07:43:02PM +0200, Lars Engels escribió: That is why on this date I propose that we cease competing on the desktop market. FreeBSD should declare 2014 to be year of the [snip] I'm a happy FreeBSD desktop user since 4.7. There are some edges, but I really like that I can can create a desktop the way _I_ want it and my mail client even allows me to break lines at 80 chars. Eat that, Apple Mail! ;-) What e-mail client do you use? Evolution? No, mutt, with vim as mail composer. :) +1 matthias (FreeBSD since 2.2.5 and sending this from an EeePC 900, netbook, UMTS connected, KDE4 desktop, sound, webcam, vim, mutt, sendmail, ...) FreeBSD desktop since 3.3 (makes me a newbie!) I really dislike pulseaudio and have managed to live without it. Firefox works fine without it. Unfortunately they dropped OSS support a while go, so I now must use alsa, but it works well and without the pain of dealing with pulseaudio, a solution in search of a problem it I ever saw one. Audio output is pretty system dependent, but I had little problem getting my audio to auto-switch to headphones when I plugged them in. The setup is a bit ugly,but I only had to check the available PINs (ugly, ugly) and set up stuff once. It just works. If you want my example set-up, I can post it somewhere or you can look in the archives for it as I have posted it in the past. I used exmh with emacs for years, but no when work stopped allowing private SMTP systems, I switched to Thunderbird. Not great, but satisfactory. I must use a bit of emulation but it works. (E.g. Flash, alsa) I can run what I need and have been happy to avoid the issues Windows users have to deal with (Can you day Windows 8 or Metro?) Power is an issue and I find the current defaults suck. Read mav's article on the subject on the wiki. -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired E-mail: rkober...@gmail.com ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
In article 533b3903.7030...@rancid.berkeley.edu, mich...@rancid.berkeley.edu writes: I have been using FreeBSD on the desktop since 1997, Hmmm. I'm a bit biased here, but I've been using FreeBSD on the desktop since, well, before it was called FreeBSD. It's still my primary platform for nearly everything (except photo management, which drove me to a Mac laptop so I could run Lightroom, and those few remaining Web sites that still bury all their content inside Flash). But let's be clear that different people have different requirements for a desktop. My requirements are relatively simple: twm, xterm, XEmacs, vlc, LaTeX, xpdf, a Jabber client (psi), $VCS_OF_CHOICE, gnucash, and at least two Web browsers (I use Opera for most stuff and Firefox for promiscuous-mode browsing). Once in a while, I even need to run a remote X application over an SSH tunnel. A Web server (Apache) and a mail server with local delivery and spam filtering (sendmail+spamass-milter+crm114) round out the requirements. I do not ever need or even want translucent windows, Zeroconf, 3-D games, or nonlinear video editing. Audio playback only matters to the extent that it's smooth and the settings stick. I write documents and code; my desktop is a productivity tool, not a gaming platform, and it performs that function quite well, thank you very much. Other people have rather different requirements, and that's OK. But let's please not break the applications for which FreeBSD is very good now (and has actually gotten substantially better). -GAWollman ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Leaving the Desktop Market
On 1 April 2014 15:40, Garrett Wollman woll...@hergotha.csail.mit.edu wrote: In article 533b3903.7030...@rancid.berkeley.edu, mich...@rancid.berkeley.edu writes: I have been using FreeBSD on the desktop since 1997, Hmmm. I'm a bit biased here, but I've been using FreeBSD on the desktop since, well, before it was called FreeBSD. It's still my primary platform for nearly everything (except photo management, which drove me to a Mac laptop so I could run Lightroom, and those few remaining Web sites that still bury all their content inside Flash). But let's be clear that different people have different requirements for a desktop. My requirements are relatively simple: twm, xterm, XEmacs, vlc, LaTeX, xpdf, a Jabber client (psi), $VCS_OF_CHOICE, gnucash, and at least two Web browsers (I use Opera for most stuff and Firefox for promiscuous-mode browsing). Once in a while, I even need to run a remote X application over an SSH tunnel. A Web server (Apache) and a mail server with local delivery and spam filtering (sendmail+spamass-milter+crm114) round out the requirements. I do not ever need or even want translucent windows, Zeroconf, 3-D games, or nonlinear video editing. Audio playback only matters to the extent that it's smooth and the settings stick. I write documents and code; my desktop is a productivity tool, not a gaming platform, and it performs that function quite well, thank you very much. Other people have rather different requirements, and that's OK. But let's please not break the applications for which FreeBSD is very good now (and has actually gotten substantially better). The problem (among many) is that you don't have those requirements but the Xorg desktop developers and the graphics driver / layer developers have those requirements and they're sure sticking to them. So, you're going to end up getting 3D/hardware accelerated graphics and crazy audio integration requirements for your web browsers soon, which drag in libdri_chipset.so and all of the bugs that keep popping up with that. It's no longer xorg just speaks to the graphics chip. -a ___ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
