WirelessMoves – Page 32 – My Thoughts on the Evolution of Wireless, FOSS and the Past, Present and Future of Computing

Running Ubuntu Linux on Bleeding Edge Hardware – Lenovo L14 Gen 2 – Part 2

I’ve ended the previous post on the topic hinting that I saw a significant performance drop on that new Lenovo L14 Gen 2 notebook during ffmpeg encoding after around 60 seconds. Instead of reaching transcoding times of around 7 minutes for my sample video, and a speedup in the order of 6x, the speed-up indicator suddenly started going backwards and reaching 3,5x speed levels, which flatly doubled the transcoding time. Even 10 year old notebooks are faster! So I had a closer look what was going on and how this could be fixed.

Running Ubuntu Linux on Bleeding Edge Hardware – Lenovo L14 Gen 2 – Part 1

And again there was a choice to make for another Linux notebook. This time, the main requirement was to get the latest CPU architecture at the risk of some rough edges that might be fixed later-on. As Lenovo usually has good Linux support, my choice fell on a Lenovo L14 Gen2 with an 11th generation Intel i5-1135G7 CPU with 4 cores and 8 threads. And I guess I got what I wanted, some excitement and adventure along the way.

Things That Moved Me In 2021

It’s the time of the year again to have a look back at the things that moved me this year. On the surface, it seems that I had relatively few posts about wireless network technologies. But this appearance is quite deceptive.

Backup: 1 TB in 35 Minutes

A quick post today on a personal new backup speed record: I do have a lot of data on my notebook and thus use a 2 TB SSD, which is currently about 50% full. Also, I do like to have an emergency spare drive at hand so I can quickly get operational again should anything happen with my notebook or the drive. That means that I have a 1:1 copy of my installation at hand that I keep up-to-date by rsync’ing deltas in regular intervals. This process is usually quite fast as the deltas are relatively small. Creating a new spare SSD, however, requires copying 1 TB of existing data to the new drive, which previously took many hours. But I’ve refined my hardware and technique over time. So this time around, I got 1 TB of data to a new spare SSD in around 35 minutes. The sustained transfer speed was 490 MB/s, or 28 GB per minute between the two LUKS encrypted partitions!

Kernel Samepage Merging

In the past, I sometimes noticed that after updating and rebooting my cloud server that runs around 12 virtual machines, memory use would decrease a few hours after reboot. The reason for this is that the kernel looks for duplicate pages and combines them. And when running 12 virtual machines, most with the same operating system and applications, a lot of optimization is possible. But that’s about all I knew about it so far. Recently, however, I stumbled across the kernel feature that perform this optimization and reports interesting details to userspace upon request: The Kernel Samepage Merging.

Book Review: Linux Kernel Programming – Kaiwan N Billimoria

From today’s perspective, one of the most important courses during my computer science education in college was the one that taught me about how operating systems work. And while many things that I learned at college are no longer relevant, the material of that course is still as relevant today as it was then. Sure, everything has become much more sophisticated, and operating systems now manage resources that are orders of magnitudes beyond what was available at that time. However, the fundamentals of how an operating system works when it comes to multitasking, memory management, file system handling, etc. are still the same. I find this knowledge absolutely essential in my everyday work and every couple of years, I have to compile a Linux kernel on my own, just for the fun of it. These days, it was time again, and after having expanded my knowledge a lot around Docker, Kubernetes, ‘the cloud’, CI/CD and other related things over the past year, I now went into the opposite direction for a while and had a look at the software that makes all of this work: The Linux kernel. To my surprise, quite a number of books on Linux kernel and driver development have recently been published, and I chose ‘Linux Kernel Programming’ by Kaiwan N Billimoria as my guide.

Patching the FN-Key on an External Lenovo Keyboard

Many years ago I bought an external USB Lenovo Thinkpad keyboard because it’s small, which is great for traveling in combination an external screen. Also, the keyboard is very quiet and works and feels exactly like the keyboard in my Lenovo notebook. The only problem plaguing me with it for many years now is that the FN and CTRL keys can’t be swapped. As a result, I came to only use it when I had no other choice, i.e. to turn down the keyboard typing noise level at home. Quite a shame, but the FN key being at the far right just ruins any 10 finger typing efficiency for me.

But with a bit of a thrill, you can patch the firmware to swap the FN+CTRL key.

Ubuntu 20.04 on a Lenovo Thinkpad E14

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve installed Ubuntu 20.04 on quite a number on new notebooks. This week’s challenge was to find a notebook that meets the following requirements: A 14″ display, a sturdy casing because it’s mostly used mobile, and ultra reliable operation, including Suspend to RAM. Suspend to Idle would not do, as one of the use cases is keep the notebook in the backpack overnight. Especially Suspend to RAM requires good BIOS and ACPI support, so I kept my eyes firmly in the Lenovo notebook camp, as they have a reputation for good Linux support. Also, the price should be below 1000 euros. In the end, I chose a Lenovo E14 for 689 euros with a 10th generation Intel i5-10210U, 16 GB of RAM and a small 256 GB SSD that will be replaced anyway. I’d say that’s a very good price for an E14 model.

Effects of Hyper-threading and Dual Channel RAM

This post is a follow up to a recent post in which I compared the ffmpeg video transcoding performance of a number of notebook-, workstation- and cloud server CPUs. Having done that, I’ve wondered a few days later what effect hyper-threading and dual channel RAM have on such a workload. The results are pretty interesting.

Wi-Fi Exploration Tools

You might have noticed that I had quite a number of Wi-Fi related posts lately. In the process, I have discovered a number of new Linux command line tools to find out more about the capabilities of the Wi-Fi network adapter in a device, the capabilities of the Access Point my device is connected to, and about the capabilities of all other Access Points in the area. So here’s a cheat sheet with a summary of those commands: