Building the perfect Linux PC with Linus Torvalds
68 points by unmole
68 points by unmole
Not the biggest fan of linus (the yt person), but comeon, Linus (torvalds) more than makes up for it.
Sometimes "not the biggest fan" can mean something negative, but I'm not interpreting it as that here. I too am not the biggest fan of Linus Sebastian, which for me really just means indifferent.
I mention it just because I actually found this video and their interaction delightful. Sebastian was just the right amount of relatable fanboying and composed professional. They're both awkward geeks but teased each other in such a warm and genuine way. I think any other figure in the tech sphere as influential as Torvalds would just be unbearable cringe in the same situation.
I'm sure most of you know, but for those who don't, Steam have recently announced the Steam Machine, a desktop PC designed specifically for running Steam games, and of course it runs Linux. Linus Sebastian is a prominent voice in the world of gaming hardware and Linus Torvalds is the preeminent voice in the world of Linux. Between them they represent some of the strongest currents in the modern tech landscape. But what a breath of fresh air to see them just have uncontrived fun together. Okay sure Sebastian has to plug his sponsors, but overall I'm so glad this video exists. Thank Turing that despite all the obscene money and power in tech, there's still room for genuine and playful face to face human interactions.
The parts list (in the video description)
I was most curious about the RAM. The video shows four Kingston 16GB 4800MT/s modules.
So I guess Linus is rawdogging it without ECC. A little surprised. I think the motherboard and CPU do support it.
No, he said he is using ECC this time around. His last build was without ECC and he regretted it, because he started getting oops a few years in. I am kinda surprised he only went for 64GB but I also don't really know how hard it is to get a consumer motherboard that supports more than that nowadays.
Most standard AM5 motherboards can take at least 256 gigs (64 gig DIMMs). Threadripper motherboards can take more. The Gigabyte TRX50 AERO D they chose can take up to 1 terabyte with 256 gig DIMMs, but finding those might be hard / expensive for a while.
I am kinda surprised he only went for 64GB but I also don't really know how hard it is to get a consumer motherboard that supports more than that nowadays.
This doesn't really apply to Threadripper. Even my first gen (8 years old) supports 128GB. The motherboard in the video supports 1TB.
I've been out of the PC building world for over a decade, but, uh, Intel competes in the discrete desktop GPU market again?
Yes, mostly on the low end rn. And they are competitive on price. The question is more if they will fund it long enough for them to compete on perf
One or two years ago, I wanted to game a little bit with sequels/remasters of games from my adolescence. These were mostly Ubisoft and Blizzard games, looking up online they semi-worked with Proton, but since I didn't want to run closed-source games on my daily driver, I shopped around for an affordable dedicated machine for me to install windows on it for the first time in ~20 years.
I settled on a NUC. Because NUCs are designed by Intel and are pretty locked within the Intel ecosystem, the gaming NUCs use a dedicated Arc GPU.
My experience is:
One of the hurdles to entering the GPU space is that the two established players have drivers that include decades of hacks and workarounds for individual games. Intel's stated priority with Arc is recent games, the top few hundred most popular games on Steam, and then everything else as best effort. So support for Vulkan and DirectX 12 games is by far the most developed. Dropping DXVK into games to force them to use Vulkan is kind of a hack, but that's why it works. For older DirectX 9 games, they actually started shipping DXVK as part of the driver a while back.
the main question, not answered: how long does it take to build the kernel on this system with every module enabled :)
No pun intended or ill intent, but I was hoping that he might have to debug frozen Linux via serial console to show what Linux is capable of doing. This would have helped me a lot in troubleshooting crashes/freezes in my system. When this happens I just use the sys_rq key reboot.
And what sort of issues come up when one does not use ECC RAM?
And what sort of issues come up when one does not use ECC RAM?
Seemingly random system instability and somewhat rarely corrupted files (this is most obvious with images that don’t open or look corrupted)
I don't feel like there was any answer at all to why he chose Intel over AMD? I've heard that AMD's drivers, while open source, contain a lot of obscure hard coded constants that nobody understands. Is that situation better with Intel graphics? Is it because Intel has paid for more of the Linux graphics infrastructure like the Direct Rendering Manager and the X.org maintenance?
The pinned comment muses on this:
Talking about the ARC GPU Choice - It was never clarified in the video because both Linus/Linus ended up continuing their conversations after being side tracked and never circled back. In our original email communications it is because Linus T drives 2 x 6K displays and needed something more than integrated graphics without being an annoying loud or power hungry "gaming" class GPU. It was suppose to be a Intel Arc B50 but we could not get one in time of shooting. Linus T clarified he was still more than ok at the time of filming with this GPU being used. Sorry this wasn't in video form, but they just had so much fun talking we all forgot to circle back to this point. - Elijah
? He's using an Intel ARC GPU. Or did you mean the CPU? Because x86_64 is...well, x86_64
Can someone elaborate on "DDR has ECC built in now but it's not enough"? Framework has this in the memory FAQ, what does it mean?
DDR5 modules have on-die ECC support and ECC modules will allow the system to function, however, ECC parity functionality is not supported by the non-Pro series APUs that Framework offers.
Here it means that the CPU shipped by Framework doesn't support ECC protocol, whatever RAM modules do is irrelevant.
Sad to see the gray-haired and grandfather looking Torvalds.
Aging is one of only two options, and the other leaves you unable to do things like have a conversation in front of a camera or send expletive laden emails :-)
I'd prefer to see him age.