Linux (debian) on cube i9

[rohtang]

Hey,

Picked up an i9 a month ago while on a trip to China. I planned on using it as a portable Linux box for coding during the commute, but never got around to play around with it properly until today.

Anyway, most things are working out of the box, but for those of you who are interested in getting linux up and running,I’ve written down how to get WLAN and BT working (the only two important things not working out of the box) in a short guide:

https://github.com/rohtang/cubed_debian

You should be able to use the methods outlined above on all flavours of Debian, includingd Mint and Ubuntu.

Cheers

[Bonnom]

Very nice!!
Thanks for sharing.

[Elio Sarotto]

Wow!!! Thank you so much man. Let’s hope that the issue with Skylake CPU’s family will be fixed soon. :'(

[rohtang]

Cheers, glad to be of assistance.

Regarding battery life – I find it acceptable and it’s in no way catastrophic. I still get a good 6-7 hours at ~50% back light – running build chains, watching videos along with web browsing. Hopefully an upcoming kernel will be able to make the CPU enter the higher sleep states…

[Elio Sarotto]

I’m happy to hear it! However I’m scared to damage the CPU using linux (as claimed by the documentation provided by intel) so I’ll wait for a patch before to buy the tablet. Did you try to install powertop and check the Idle stats? Just to know if the deepest power saving state is only PC3.

[rohtang]

Hey,

 

It’s firmly stuck in the PC2 package state – not sure what’s preventing it from going lower in to one of the lower states. Running 4.6 and I’ve updated the BIOS (and, implicitly, microcode). It’s probably some device that’s preventing deeper sleep, I’ve yet to determine the cause though.

          Package   |             Core    |            CPU 0       CPU 2
                    |                     | C0 active   5.1%        5.3%
                    |                     | POLL        0.1%    3.8 ms  0.0%
                    |                     | C1E-SKL     6.9%    1.9 ms  1.6%
C2 (pc2)   51.6%    |                     |
C3 (pc3)    0.0%    | C3 (cc3)    2.7%    | C3-SKL      2.3%    1.5 ms  0.6%
C6 (pc6)    0.0%    | C6 (cc6)    4.6%    | C6-SKL      4.6%    1.3 ms  2.0%
C7 (pc7)    0.0%    | C7 (cc7)   61.5%    | C7s-SKL     0.0%    0.3 ms  0.0%
C8 (pc8)    0.0%    |                     | C8-SKL     21.2%    2.9 ms 31.1%
C9 (pc9)    0.0%    |                     | C9-SKL      0.0%    0.0 ms  0.0%
C10 (pc10)  0.0%    |                     | C10-SKL    54.0%   10.3 ms 52.2%

                    |             Core    |            CPU 1       CPU 3
                    |                     | C0 active   3.4%        3.7%
                    |                     | POLL        0.0%    0.0 ms  0.2%
                    |                     | C1E-SKL     3.3%    0.8 ms  6.9%
                    |                     |
                    | C3 (cc3)    0.7%    | C3-SKL      0.2%    0.3 ms  0.7%
                    | C6 (cc6)    7.2%    | C6-SKL      4.4%    0.9 ms  5.7%

[Elio Sarotto]

Thanks a lot for the response. Even worse than what I expected.  🙁

I think we have to wait for an update of Linux Kernel for solve this problem, and surfing the web it seems to be not so easy also for the kernel developers. Moreover, I sent a tweet to Intel support asking if they are planning a solution to the problem but they just replied that this CPU family has not Intel support for Linux but only for Windows 10.

[Pigman Rocker]

alright really thinking of doing this. anyone have tips on DE, good programmas, etc?

[Tofe]

Hello,

I received my Cube i9 yesterday, and hopefully it’s working fine. I’m going to put Linux on it besides Windows 10.

So far I’ve simply booted a USB Live Ubuntu 16.04, and it’s quite promising. Everything apart from wifi (didn’t test bluetooth yet) worked well, even the touchpad gestures.

Beware, I tried booting that same Ubuntu after flashing the optimized BIOS, and it didn’t work (only black screen). I guess some of the modifications introduced a regression in the detection of the bios capabilities, or something like that. Unfortunately I don’t have the kernel output, so it’s hard to tell what went wrong.

Next step will be partitionning, installing, and configuring the OS so that it can be used as a tablet. Gnome Shell and Unity are the two best options so far, I’d say. I hope the onscreen keyboard won’t be too basic.

[darksnoopy]

Hey guys i am really interested in buying this tablet. Can anyone confirm if the power-saving-state bug is fixed with linux 16.04 ? Or with the testing kernel ver 4.4.6-1 ?

Thanks!

[rohtang]

Not fixed as of yet in latest 4.6-trunk.

FWIW, I’ve been running linux on the thing for a while now, with no ill side effects. Except slightly worse battery performance compared to w10.

Intels cautionary clause regarding long term negative impact on the SoC due to not entering lower power states isn’t specific to skylake, btw.

[Tofe]

@rohtang: did you succeed making wifi work on linux 4.6 ? I tried yesterday without success.
It seems it has been integrated into the main trunk, in the rtl8xxxu driver, but it didn’t find any wifi network when I tried it.
Also I’ve tried the lwfinger driver with 4.6.3, but it doesn’t seem to work either. However maybe it was conflicting with rtl8xxxu now, I have to check again…

More generally, frankly, using Ubuntu on a tablet without a keyboard is still very combersome. I’ll try to improve the situation, but I don’t know how far that’ll go.

[darksnoopy]

Thank you both. I am still thinking about buying it, to replace my n2820 toshiba laptop. I just think its a bit overpriced. In this price tag i would like to have the keyboard as a standard and maybe a laminated screen (not to mention the copper mod)

[BBaker]

rohtang wrote:

Not fixed as of yet in latest 4.6-trunk. FWIW, I’ve been running linux on the thing for a while now, with no ill side effects. Except slightly worse battery performance compared to w10. Intels cautionary clause regarding long term negative impact on the SoC due to not entering lower power states isn’t specific to skylake, btw.

I read that this problem was specific to just the “mobile” Skylake processors.  Also, a potential workaround given here…  http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpost.php?s=0ce4d064306e55f2f265e8c6fb621c5b&p=1766502&postcount=24

The most noticeable issues with earlier kernels were video glitches (the GPU would hang) and power management with the mobile Skylake chips, which are used in the NUCs. (The CPU is intended to automatically drop down to reduced power states when it’s able. There were indications that the chip did (or does) not do that on Linux. Intel publishes a disclaimer for its recent chips, including Haswell, that such behavior could shorten the chip’s life span.)

To compensate for the power issue, I installed and used Powertop, which is a tool intended to manage and limit power consumption on laptops (and NUC’s are essentially laptops in a little box). Installing it in Fedora sets up a Systemd service that can be enabled. On my NUC, this allowed the CPU to enter some of those reduced power states.

[BBaker]

Powertop 2.8: https://01.org/powertop/downloads/powertop-v2.8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerTOP

https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop

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