Aaron44126

If you want to try to match my configuration and maybe shed some light on this, try to install driver 512.18. During NVIDIA driver setup, pick "custom" and check the box for "clean install". Once it is all settled, try booting with turbo boost 3 disabled. (Everyone in this thread says that this is an issue only with newer NVIDIA drivers, which is why I immediately went to this particular version that someone stated as working — but I didn't see that anyone had made a connection with "Intel Turbo Boost 3.0".)

Spent some time looking at this. That thing is not part of GNOME, directly; it is the "GTK File Chooser" and it does not have options to change how the size is presented (either from the user side via a config file or something, or from the application side via a parameter to the method that makes it pop up). I see more or less where the code is and I might try patching it at some point. They do have a parameter that can be passed to the "format the size" function that will cause it to show in IEC units (1024-based), so it would be an easy one-line change. GTK is a pretty core library though so I'll have to read up on how to do it properly. What I'd rather do is add support to change the behavior via a config file (...there are some other config file options available that are respected by the File Chooser, like hiding the "recent folders" panel, so I could just hook in with those), and then submit it to GTK as a feature improvement. No idea if they would take it. I think it would be easy enough to justify since the GTK File Chooser is widely used even if you are not using GNOME (it pops up in Firefox on KDE for example), just to give users an options to have their file sizes match between apps. Anyway. This is not especially high on my priority list. But it is the one place where I can't change the file size display format and it actually bothers me. ———————————————————————— Things are much smoother with 120 Hz working. I am spoiled and don't think I will ever go back to a system with a 60 Hz display. Formatted one of my 8TB drives for use in Linux. Got it all set up with MDRAID RAID-0 and LUKS encryption. (No encryption on the system/boot volume yet.) It's a one-drive RAID-0 array, but this way I just add more drives to the array as I free them up and grow my partition later. Also, set up a job to sync my KeePass password database between Linux and the other places where I use it. Things are moving along.

This may be related to mine. I wonder if, when I was on the newer NVIDIA driver and getting the BSOD earlier, and if I had gone and enabled "turbo boost 3.0" if it would have bypassed the BSOD. Anyway. It's working now and I don't want to mess with it any further either 😛

I just did the 1.21.1 BIOS update. Good so far. I rolled back from 1.20 to 1.19 after the first hard lock (it happened right after I did the update to 1.20 so I found that to be suspicious timing), but I have since experienced two hard locks on 1.19. Regarding Turbo Boost Maximum Technology 3.0, it is interesting that it was turned on for you (by default or by some update). I'm reasonably sure that it has always been off for me, from when I first got the system until now. I checked again just now after doing the BIOS update to make sure that it was off. In the help text for that option it says that turning it on disables NVIDIA Dynamic Boost 2.0, which is not something that I would want to happen.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/21/23692449/elon-musk-twitter-government-funded-media-labels-removed Twitter is removing the "government-funded" labels from NPR/PBS/BBC ... and it is removing the labels from propaganda outlets like RT in Russia and Xinhua in China as well. The page that used to explain these labels is also gone. Also, now that "legacy" verified blue checkmarks are being discontinued and removed, Elon Musk is giving out blue checkmarks to some celebrities who didn't want to pay for them... (Wasn't the whole point of this new system to supposedly level out the playing field for everyone?) https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/20/23691831/twitter-blue-verified-celebrity-lebron-james-stephen-king

Hmm. I do not have Intel Turbo Boost Maximum Technology 3.0 turned on. (It is not turned on by default, and when I tested it on my Precision 7770, I found that having that enabled decreased peak dGPU performance by quite a bit.)

So I got another hard lock (after almost a month since the last one) so I'm poking around with some different things. First, I reset the NVRAM and put all of the BIOS settings back. I decided to try running with graphics switching disabled (NVIDIA GPU driving everything), so I made that change in the BIOS. As soon as I booted up, I immediately got a bluescreen from nvpcf.sys. Anyone else seen this? It looks like its a thing. nvpcf.sys is the "NVIDIA platform controllers and framework" driver, and I know some users have had issues with it just showing an error in Device Manager. Following advice in the linked thread, I installed an older version of the NVIDIA driver (512.18), after running DDU, and it seems to be working (for now). I was previously using the current driver from Dell, 517.89.

Playing with using "Nemo" as the default file manager. Not sure if this is my final solution; I tried it because it looked really easy to switch to and switch back. Nemo is the default file manager for Linux Mint / Cinnamon. Switching is just: https://askubuntu.com/a/1446372/702934 (A lot of this answer is duplicative, explaining different ways to do the same thing. You really just need to do the first four shell commands at the top and then restart the GNOME session.) Nemo has way more options than the stock GNOME file manager, and it does have an option to use "binary" (1024-based) file sizes, in Preferences under Display. Doing things like File->Open in a program to open a file browser still use the standard GNOME dialog (I'm not sure if there is an easy way to change that).

Copied the kernel packages from Ubuntu 23.04 and installed on 22.04. Pretty straight-forward. Now running Linux kernel 6.2. 120 Hz now works off of the Intel GPU, I just had to go toggle it over in GNOME settings. Now running an "unsupported configuration" so it's manual kernel package updates, and hopefully there's no big trouble. (6.2 kernel on 22.04 should become supported and show up in the standard repo in a few months.)

The size formatting consistency is just great (1024 vs. 1000 unit sizes). Same app! (Marking up screen shots right in Linux for the first time. Got to get used to a new image editor. I do like how Alt+PrtSc takes a screenshot of the window with proper transparency around the edges and everything. Can't do that in Windows without a third-party app. The stock snip app can do a window screenshot, but it will grab elements of whatever is behind if there are rounded corners.) [Edit] Woot! Ubuntu 23.04 with Linux kernel 6.2 supports my laptop's 120 Hz display on the Intel GPU with no fuss. Now, I guess I will have to pull that kernel over...

Howdy face login was very easy to set up. However, it didn't end up working out well. I apparently have two usable cameras, /dev/video0 which is the regular camera and /dev/video2 which is the IR camera. The regular camera worked for a bit but after a while started just outputting all black images, so howdy could not see me. The IR camera is supposedly better to use for this sort of thing, but that didn't work with howdy either, the capture was just too dark for howdy to get a good face ID (unless I put a really bright image on the screen... I live in dark mode!). So, password for now I guess. Now, what is going on with this??? I was on "Balanced" mode when I spotted this, but I set it to "Performance" mode when gaming yesterday. This might explain why I had one weird moment of it being stuck at around 20 FPS for 30 seconds or so. I found other people complaining about weird/random performance issues that seem to be related to this. How do I disable this intelligent performance limiting behavior? Disable thermald? I'm happy just let the CPU throttle itself, thanks. [Edit] $ powerprofilesctl performance: Driver: intel_pstate Degraded: yes (high-operating-temperature) * balanced: Driver: intel_pstate power-saver: Driver: intel_pstate Nothing is going on right now, temps are fine... [Edit 2] Nevermind, doing it to myself. Disabling turbo boost with "/sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo" = 1 causes this message to appear. There's a bug report about it over here. Will continue to monitor performance issues... Still learning more every day. [Edit 3] Well, no performance issues gaming this evening. ..Other than that I forgot to run my "high performance" script before starting (enabled turbo boost, Dell BIOS high performance mode, etc.) and had a "what the heck is going on" moment. I had that fully automated on Windows and still need to work out that tooling here on Linux. Here's an annoying thing. If I disconnect my game controller (Sony DualSense), the Steam client decides it wants to pop open in my face. Not sure if anything can be done about that.

Noticing a lack of details on what exactly Microsoft supposedly did...? Looks like a typical Musk lash-out when things aren't going his way. [Edit] In reference to OpenAI using Twitter data to train ChatGPT? https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/19/23690216/elon-musk-microsoft-ai-lawsuit-threat

My VMware Windows VM is working much better now that I also forced it to P cores only. I think that the "vmware-vmx" process was also identified as a background task and stuffed to the E cores. (That one makes more sense, since you don't engage with its process directly from the desktop ...? It technically is a background process.) I've seen other complaints about this; VMware doesn't seem to have done anything yet to work with Alder Lake / Raptor Lake hybrid architecture setups (on either Windows or Linux hosts), leaving it to users to basically figure it out on their own. I plan to leave the Windows VM on all of the time, but I don't like the idea that a Windows background indexing job or something could gobble time on the P cores (and eat into the limited power budget of a CPU/GPU combo workload) while I'm doing something resource-intensive on the Linux side. I'm going to set up a solution to have it automatically shuffle between P or E cores depending on whether I'm actively using it or not. I have a few things to stitch together to make that work. ...The fingerprint reader driver died again, same symptoms as before, so I think that I'm going to give up on it. I've gone and removed the driver and support packages. I'll figure out "howdy" face recognition authentication soon.

You can virtually always get a better deal than the web site shows by going to a sales rep directly.

This has been previously reported and is a "side-effect" of disabling the EC fan control in certain Dell systems. Unfortunately, there is nothing that I can do about it. Any other tools that use the same fan control mechanism (SpeedFan, HWiNFO64) will have the same issue.

My Precision 7770 replacement fans still make a noticeable startup noise (even if it is maybe not as bad as the original ones). If these really have a quiet start then I might look at trying to source one of these heatsinks and install it in the 7770. (My idle fan RPMs are lower now that I'm on Linux as primary and I'm back to dynamically adding CPU load to keep them from powering off. I actually sort of like that it is contributing to Folding@Home instead of just doing junk work like I had before, though, so maybe I will just keep this setup.) Questions: Can you get the heatsink part number? (You should be able to go to dell.com/support, put in your service tag, and pull the parts list.) What power level do you see the CPU running at when you do a Cinebench test? Feel free to start an "owner's thread" ... I haven't seen anyone else show up with one of these new systems, or even mention that they had ordered one.

In your scheduled task "Action", make sure that you set the "Start in" field. It should be the full path to the folder containing Dell Fan Management.

Well. I guess I am not sure if it was the fingerprint reader or USB bus power related or what, but I seem to have possibly solved the buzzing by adding the fingerprint reader to the USB "autosuspend" blacklist so the kernel never tries to shut it off. (Reference.)

Ubuntu 23.04 is releasing... tomorrow. I don't want to install a non-LTS version, but I'll at least boot a live media and check it out; I want to see if there are any improvements to the iGPU driver (hello, 120 Hz display?). It has kernel 6.2, which will be released in the official Ubuntu 22.04 repos probably in August. ————————————————————— Still getting the electrical buzzing sound from my laptop, so I don't think that it is iGPU power management (which I presently have disabled). Here's something crazy that I just noticed. The laptop isn't always buzzing. But if it is, I can do this in the terminal: > sudo echo hi This causes a prompt for my fingerprint to appear. When the prompt is up, the buzzing stops. As soon as I do a fingerprint scan and the prompt goes away, the buzzing comes back. It's consistently reproducible, I did it like five times in a row just now. I don't think it is related to the fingerprint reader necessarily (...the buzzing is actually coming from the opposite side of the laptop...), but something to do with power management. The fingerprint reader is internally attached via USB. I think that when the fingerprint reader is "awake" and listening for a scan, it also wakes up the USB bus and something in the PCH, and somehow that causes the buzzing to stop. Going to have to poke around and see if I can find other ways to reliably stop the buzzing, and if I can do something to prevent the laptop to going to whatever power state causes this. Again, never once experienced this on Windows, so Linux is doing something different.

I'm on 5.19. I thought that was high enough to have proper support for Intel Thread Director.

BIOS update 1.21.1. https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=86R0Y - This release contains security updates as disclosed in the Dell Security Advisories DSA-2023-091, DSA-2023-095, and DSA-2023-099. For more information, see Dell Security Advisories and Notices. - Firmware updates to address security vulnerabilities including (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures - CVE) such as CVE-2022-30339. - Fixed the issue where the system cannot boot.

So, here's a fun thing regarding the fingerprint reader... The Linux driver uploads its own firmware to the thing, causing it to not work if I reboot into Windows (which I did today to grab my Firefox profile to move to my Windows VM). But then, in Windows, the Broadcom driver will flash the Windows version of the firmware onto the fingerprint reader, so now it won't work when you boot into Linux. Each time the fingerprint reader firmware is flashed, you have to reboot before it works properly, so if you bounce between operating systems you're going to have a little firmware war going on. I think I managed to disable the automatic flash on the Windows side so this won't be an issue next time. Playing games this evening... Much better. I used "taskset" to set the process affinity when starting the app rather than after it was running, no idea why the latter didn't seem to work, but this did the trick. The CPU load stayed on the P cores and the game had a nice stable 30 FPS. I'll be doing some more scripts to automatically set the performance stuff up when starting a game and tear it down afterwards. I already had something similar for Windows. (...In addition to process affinity, I like to keep turbo boost disabled but enable it for gaming, set the NVIDIA GPU to prefer a higher power level, change the Dell BIOS "thermal mode" to ramp up the fans more readily, and so on. All of that can be scripted out.) I did notice that... yuzu has options for "borderless windowed" and "exclusive fullscreen", similar to what you see with many Windows games. "Exclusive fullscreen" is definitely more smooth than "borderless windowed", which I found to be a bit jerky. Even though, "exclusive fullscreen" doesn't seem to be exclusive; when it is active, I can still Alt+Tab to different programs and have windows running on top of the game. Maybe it caused Freesync to engage? I know that Freesync is supported with this hardware/software stack but I don't know how to tell if it is active.

Some poking this morning... There was a kernel update from Ubuntu. After installing it, I had to rebuild and reinstall the VMware kernel modules. Looks like this is going to be a recurring thing. I'll make a script so it will be easy. This might be an issue because I'm running VMware Workstation 16 instead of the current version 17; I don't know if it officially supports Ubuntu 22.04 (it's just what I have a license for). NVIDIA kernel modules were automatically dealt with after the kernel update was installed, by dkms. [Edit] VMware documentation does say that VMware 16.2.x supports Ubuntu 22.04 as a host. My laptop display supports 120 Hz, but GNOME will only allow me to select 60 Hz. xrandr -q does not reveal any 120 Hz options detected. I disabled graphics switching in the BIOS to attach the NVIDIA GPU to the laptop built-in display. With that, there was no issue selecting the 120 Hz display option. So, the Intel GPU driver is what appears to be holding me up here. I pulled the values needed for an xrandr modeline but was unable to get 120 Hz working under Intel graphics by messing around with xrandr. I've been fighting with some weird electrical buzzing sound coming from the laptop that I never heard while running Windows. I thought that it might be related to Intel CPU C-states and did work to block everything higher than C1, but it still occurs. Based on when I hear it (when switching over to VMware, or a couple of times when starting a video), I think that it is related to the Intel GPU power management. I figured out how to add a kernel parameter to disable that for now; we'll see if that makes a difference. ArchWiki is being pretty helpful with regards to messing with the display stuff, even though I'm not using Arch. ...Need to stop messing with this and do some actual work.

I just realized that you added more content to that post. Yes, I definitely am pushing it when it comes to multi-tasking, and the GDI issues that I referred to get worse the more stuff that I have open. Also, I will go days or weeks between reboots if I can help it, and the issues also get worse the longer my session is running. With regards to the calculator issue, I was referring to the Win32 calculator app, not the UWP one. The Win32 app is used in Windows 8.1 (and earlier), Windows Server, and Windows 10 LTSC. Also, Windows wants to have no more than 10,000 GDI handles open. There's a registry setting to adjust this limitation and you can set it up to around 65,000. If you go over the handle limit, nothing "breaks" per se but performance gets even worse. (I'm not sure how this works exactly but I found it noted multiple times including in this link that I posted above.) ...I wrote a quick program to count up the number of GDI handles by process on my system and found myself using about 33,000 during a typical session that had been going for a couple of weeks. One application was responsible for about half of those: Quicken. So, am I "contributing" to the problem with the way that I use my PC? Yes, for sure. Though I'd argue that in 2023, with the PCs that we have now, I shouldn't have to worry about such limitations. Here. I recorded a video from my Windows VM to demonstrate. This is a brand new Windows install with nothing extra installed except for VMware Tools, MS Office, and what you see on the taskbar. I do have animations turned off (maybe Microsoft uses those to cover things up a bit) but I have seen these on my main system with animations turned on. For Notepad can see the white parts of the window before it gets painted when I open a file browser (visible on most of the attempts), and for the calculator, it was harder to reproduce but you can see it most on the second-to-last attempt, at around 0:32. Again, this is not the worst I've seen it; it starts getting slower if the session has been really busy for a long time. Sometimes I can see it rendering the calculator buttons individually. I'll say that the "fun" part didn't come until after the "actually get a distro sort of up and working" part. I was more frustrated when I kept running into walls just getting one to install. Even now I am treading lightly in some ways. I know that if I mess with the NVIDIA driver too much, for example, there's a chance that I'll end up in a "can't boot" situation and then it might take me a while to figure out how to use the available recovery tools to resolve that. I'd say, if you're rebuilding a system and interested in a possible Linux switch, and you have some time, then give it a go. Games are more-or-less solved thanks to Steam Proton and Lutris (check out some YouTube videos on those). You don't even have to trash your Windows install, just shrink your Windows partition to free up some space for a Linux install (or install just Linux on a separate drive) and you can dip your toes in. Worst case, you learned some stuff and can just throw it away and switch to Windows anyway. It seems to me like we have a lot of "overlaps" as you said so you might have a similar experience to me. Yeah, I don't think that its the boot image that I'm worried about; I am still able to boot with secure boot on, just the VMware kernel modules will not load (VMware will complain, and if I try to load them in the terminal, I get a vague error). I did find directions on how to sign them. I'll try it (eventually). ——————————————————————————————————— New observation regarding the fingerprint reader. The driver has crashed or something after a few hours. At one point it failed to read my fingerprint and just sort of hung, and eventually prompted for my password. Now, it just always goes straight to the password prompt, and when I put in my password it takes a few seconds for it to actually unlock. And it takes 10+ seconds for the sudo password prompt to appear in a terminal. I saw that there is a different Git branch of the driver for "jammy" (Ubuntu 22.04) so I'll try switching to that and see if it is better. Otherwise, I guess I'll have to forego using the fingerprint and I'll try switching to face login. [Edit] "jammy" fingerprint reader driver didn't work for me at all; no fingerprint for now, maybe I'll fight with it later. [Edit 2] Literally right after I posted that, it started working, so I'm going to see if maybe it doesn't "crash" or whatever this time!

Cool... Do you recall if that also included support for calendar appointments & tasks? My past experience with this (with Thunderbird) was that you basically had to use IMAP which meant mail only. Thunderbird doesn't have any native Exchange support (unless there is some addon that provides it that I don't know about), but it looks like they have shoved a calendar function in there now. Exchange ActiveSync is like a "lite" version of the Exchange protocol that is used by, say, smartphones to talk to Exchange. It's adequate for mail/contacts/calendar/tasks sync and it doesn't necessarily have to be used with a phone. You can actually use desktop Outlook and attach it to a Hotmail/Outlook.com account via Exchange ActiveSync instead of regular Exchange (have to do some trickery to get it to use that protocol) and you can barely tell the difference. Anyway, I'll be messing with this sometime in the next few days. ———————————————————————————————— Still fighting with some performance inconsistencies when gaming. Today, I noticed that one of my "E cores" are under heavy load, even though I used "taskset" to set yuzu to run on the P cores only (0-15). It seemed to take because I can query the process affinity and it returns the same thing that I set (0-15 instead of 0-23). Here, I have a screenshot. yuzu is the only process using any significant CPU. It's affinity is for CPUs 1-16 (P cores only). "top" reports yuzu using 2.7 cores, and in Activity Monitor we can see that most of that load was given to the E cores (17-24 by its count), and the P cores (1-16) are hardly doing anything, despite the CPU affinity that I gave to yuzu. Confused ...? The game is struggling at 10 FPS (target is 30 FPS). It's an emulator, so it is CPU heavy. I'd really like to move that load up to the P cores which should be way faster. On that note, how is kernel module (driver) activity tracked? In Windows, it all went to the "System" process on the process list. I don't see anything analogous in Linux?