ASUS 1025C-amd64 GMA3600 4.14.209:XORG 1.20.8 fails - SOLVED

lanthruster · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2012 Posts: 60

Asus 1025C 64bit/4GB Ram
I have a strange problem. X-org not starting with the following output:

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 22646

It looks to me like the X server starts fine, then quits right away because you do not have any installed X applications to keep the session alive. As for the video setting, please post the output of emerge --info.

eccerr0r · Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2020 11:11 pm Post subject:

If you want to run traditional X Window System, setting USE=twm for x11-apps/xinit so you can pick up the traditional xclock, xterm, and twm.
These are not needed if you're planning to run a full desktop environment or have some other plans for X?

In any case there are multiple parts of the driver, specifically for the 3d portion, so this may cause some confusion. All driver parts are called "drivers" and they all need to be set up properly to get 3d to work.

BTW, I think the native GMA500 / GMA3600 driver was pruned from Gentoo with the rest of the infrequently used drivers? (Power VR is the GPU for these instead of Intel, I don't think the standard Intel driver will work.) Using fbdev should work fine too, just no 3d acceleration.
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lanthruster · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2012 Posts: 60

Whew, thanks Hu,

That WAS the correct guess. It's late and it was so long ago since I last installed xorg server that I forgot that without xterm installed or something like "startx glxgears" it has nothing to do. And I was so confused with that dri driver message that I thought that it exits because of that message. The keyboard is actually working, that is a misleading message in xorg log. I'm not sure why it's there but later in the log I see

lanthruster · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2012 Posts: 60

For everyone else Gentoo users who is reading that post, I'm sure you would like the story behind

It's possible to turn Asus 1025C into a Linux dev MONSTER and do it cheap. I'm a programmer and I bought mine (second 1025c) for 20$ it had a burnt mobo and was not turning on. I opened it and found the cause then hot aired the repairs on the mobo. Then I changed the LCD panel for a better view, installed 4Gb of memory, added INTEL SSDSC2BB240G6, changed the cooling system paste under CPU and southbridge, and installed a new BIOS that turned on 64 bit support for Atom N2800 which it originally lacked because of the microcode that Asus loaded there. The reason to turn off 64 bit support was only because GMA3600 is not Intel. And the 3rd party did not provide drivers for 64bit systems. So basically as long as Windows is concerned the system is restricted to 3100Mb of memory and 32bit Operating System with max of 2Gb option available from Asus.
But not now.

I configured kernel for performance (preemptive config) with

lanthruster · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2012 Posts: 60

You were all so right. It's me, I messed up with xorg-server. I believed that xterm is installed by default with xorg but it's not the case. And with my concerns about GMA support and that DRI driver failure I thought that xorg is not working. Which was wrong.

Correct GMA3600 core built into Atom is not Intel. But that gives us an opportunity for the funniest and the most interesting hack. That laptop has microcode loaded in CPU that prohibits 64bit support although the CPU itself does support 64bit, but because Power VR doesn't provide Windows 64bit graphic drivers the manufacturers decided to limit this CPU to 32bit support. And that was all so partially marketing. 1025c has a beast inside but it's tainted by PowerVR video drivers not supporting 64bit platforms. Because of that the manufacturers packed some serious hardware limited it and then marketed it as a cheap laptop. It was originally cheap. And it's very cheap now. You can take it and turn it into a 64bit platform preemptive kernel monster. I bought mine out of fun as I usually like to repair the hardware and during my quest over what was wrong with that mobo I learnt a lot out of it.
The short story: do use the paste over the tape under the radiator. That tape is pretty bad for 2 reasons - it's degrading over the time and when it degrades it cover the sough bridge and the CPU with the acid. And another thing - please be careful with the charger power code. It turns out that laptop is constructed in way that if you short-circuit the cord and that cord can be easily short-circuit you will end up with a dead mobo. I bought mine with with the short-circuited PSU and dead mobo.

Standard INTEL driver will NOT WORK for that netbook. You need to turn on in-kernel modsetting with GMA500/GMA3600 flags and use XORG modsetting with glamor. In that setup unless you play games it has a pretty cool graphics. It can render glxgears in 640x480 at 92FPS utilizing only 2.68 load average - half of it's CPU power (but with the preemptive model you can get 10 load average out of it and still get it responsive).

Use SSD for that netbook. Gentoo LiveDVD hardened 2017 will boot from USB on that laptop although the bootloader graphic interface will fail. The netwrok and even FB from LiveDVD will function out of the box. That gives the opportunity for the install.

As it's hardened LiveDVD before proceeding with the install turn on

lanthruster · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2012 Posts: 60

And finally here is some helpful kernel flags to make your ASUS 1025C hardware work
Do use 4.14.x kernel.

eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2020 2:27 am Post subject:

I'm still using my Asus eeepC 901 with Gentoo and it's still compiling everything including rust and firefox. Battery pack has decayed over the years and cant get the 5+ hours anymore. It uses Intel graphics so I can use the typical Intel chipset graphics drivers (It has 945GM graphics) or fbcon like other chipsets. CPU is 32-bit only and single core/dual thread so it takes forever to do updates, though currently distcc is helping a bit for things that aren't rusty. Only have 2GB RAM which is "okay" for 32-bit. Fortunately it's still working, I think it's the only machine I have that suspend/resume works predictably well.
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lanthruster · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2012 Posts: 60

If the memory is not soldered on the mobo you may try 4Gb stick on it. It might work.

I'll keep this thread posted till 1025c build is complete. So far I'm stressing the system with load - using 14 terminals, each emerging a packet the load average goes to 17, but GLXgears still output 25FPS in 640x480, CPU temperature is not going higher than 150F and xterm GUI is responsive. I'm gong for Plasma next.

I think it might be good to know for everyone that there is a stable and inexpensive ultra-light mobile platform that can run gentoo. I was asking that question to myself if 1025C will work under linux or this experiment is just a waste of money.

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Dec 14, 2020 8:40 am Post subject:

would be nice if this 901 had more cpu horsepower, this 1c2t 1.6GHz atom is glacial (and finding a ddr2 4G sodimm is going to cost an arm and a leg). But with the intel gpu drivers and cpu unloaded I can get 500 FPS on glxgears with vertical blank sync disabled on default window, 150fps at 1024x600, and of course 60fps with vertical blank mode at default... crappy by today's standards but shows that MESA emulation is slower than using the proper driver.

Sometimes wished powervr never happened, but alas it did...

(and it would have been nice to be able to install a regular 2.5" HDD in this thing, alas I'm stuck with a 32G mPCIe.)
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lanthruster · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2012 Posts: 60

I'll detail on 1025c + Gentoo when the build is complete. Just in case you would ever consider an upgrade.

the current findings:

* 4.14.209-preempt + the modified BIOS microcode allowing amd64 architecture + SSD + 4Gb of memory are producing a stable platform. It can handle tremendous for this CPU and netbook loads : like 22la + 5GB used swap file and remain responsive, I stress-tested it for weeks and no problems so far

* 2D graphics is cool with GMA3600 in-kernel support you shouldn't expect any rendering problems, BUT, KDE/PLASMA 5.20.4 + QT 5.15.2 are buggy, I opened a bug on PLASMA 5.20.4 short version : drawing locks, KDE popup menu with only 1 item renders about 20 seconds, and it happens with some other KDE control panels and menus while QT applications like VLC or qtbittorent (or any other except Plasma) are fine no delays. It doesn't depend on composition, effects - it's laggy always. The mouse goes to a popup-menu plasmashell takes about 100% of a thread and after 10 to 20+ seconds a popup menu with one single item appears. The second pass is faster until you hit a new popup and then again that long delay. The situation is getting worse when netbook is under load. Basically PLASMA is unusable on 1025c platform. But you still need it for LX-QT

* good news - forget plasma until the lockup bug is fixed, LX-QT + openbox are amazingly responsive on this platform. Remember 24la and 5Gb swap file size? You can still work in LX-QT and use other tools under that load with insignificant and understandable delays (to compare LX-QT with plasma - at this LA plasma is just dead and it been dead since LA4 with enough RAM with no swapping, you can't make PLASMA to response when LA goes higher than 4 and even when LA is 2 the locks are awful). With LX-QT the responsiveness that you so gladly noticed in terminal programs would stretch to the graphic environment. LX-QT is definitely recommended for 1025c

* audio : this laptop only has 1 speaker although the sound chip supports stereo, I thought I would need some re-config and even read 1025c + alsa
article here : https://www.linuxsecrets.com/archlinux-wiki/wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ASUS_Eee_PC_1025c.html
but you do not need it, it works out of the box in mono mode with 4.14 kernel and the current

eccerr0r · Posted: Tue Dec 22, 2020 3:03 pm Post subject:

Mainline Firefox is sluggish on many websites on the 1c2t Atom @ 1600. I don't have any newer Atoms to compare to, but the same websites/Firefox are considerably better on full CPUs. And yes it takes several days of compiling for my Atom to get through its updates, rust takes almost a day to finish, gcc not that far behind, and firefox similar. Most packages at least gets some distcc help on my other machines at least, but the 1c2t only goes so far...

I use xfce4 on my Atom likewise my other machines. Hopefully its simplicity saves on some horsepower but still provide most modern desktop environment functionality.
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lanthruster · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2012 Posts: 60

I'll give a detailed report on navigators and video performance as soon as the required tools are merged :-)

And will try xfce on the same netbook.

Meanwhile I found at least one cause of lags in KDE popup menus and other menus.

The problem narrowed down to icons in SVG format. If an icon has svg format @ /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/
then it will be laggy with qtsvg if cache is expired (which is almost always)

eccerr0r · Posted: Thu Dec 24, 2020 9:31 am Post subject:

2018-10-13T20:27:49 >>> dev-lang/rust-1.29.1: 16:05:30
2018-11-29T01:22:29 >>> dev-lang/rust-1.29.1-r1: 9:28:27
2019-05-25T07:14:56 >>> dev-lang/rust-1.34.2: 17:10:55
2019-10-26T12:43:05 >>> dev-lang/rust-1.37.0: 16:59:54
2019-12-10T09:18:16 >>> dev-lang/rust-1.37.0: 17:17:49

2017-12-03T04:31:52 >>> sys-devel/gcc-6.4.0: 7:00:25
2018-06-18T02:30:21 >>> sys-devel/gcc-6.4.0-r1: 7:15:46
2018-10-13T09:19:24 >>> sys-devel/gcc-7.3.0-r3: 7:41:42
2019-05-24T06:43:55 >>> sys-devel/gcc-8.3.0-r1: 10:25:07
2019-12-09T04:23:02 >>> sys-devel/gcc-9.2.0-r2: 12:55:57

pain in the Atom... Would hope yours would be half as long...
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lanthruster · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2012 Posts: 60

eccerr0r · Posted: Thu Dec 24, 2020 6:58 pm Post subject:

Incidentally I don't think forcing swap is any good benchmark at all, other than testing your personal patience.
If you force the computer to thrash, likely processes will be stuck in uninterruptible sleep for a significant amount of time, and if enough of them are in this state, the cpu/ram isn't actually being used at all during this time... Counterproductive IMHO.
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lanthruster · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2012 Posts: 60

It went as high as 25+La sometimes + (4 threads CPU) for a period of 12+ hours. This netbook has southbridge and CPU closely under one heat exchanger, N2800 supports 64bit (according to Intel) but always locked by OEM to 32bit and it's never supplied with more than 2Gb of RAM. With the patched BIOS microcode it's unlocked to 64bit and has 4Gb of RAM available. The idea was to check the reasons for that and to proof the platform reliability while building gentoo. If you have other suggestions how to make RAM/CPU/IO tests while still building Gentoo... - please share. The reasons of locking CPU because of missing/ unavailable for some manufacturing reasons 64bit Graphic drivers/marketing is just a best guess. I don't know if it's true. But it looks like it's going to work.

That said everyone has a great opportunity to have a new netbook cheap. Due that OEM locks these books are not valued by their owners. The aftermarket is full of them and you can get it cheap and turn into a netbook king given the size and available CPU/RAM it can support after unlock.
The only question is - will it work normally. So far it did progress with building Firefox - FF works normally and can play video from youtube. For some reason linker died at 98% without any message. It just stuck in emerge phase doing nothing, got to run ebuild to continue from where is stopped.

1024x video can play on this netbook without hardware decoding, but HD will unlikely to play, I'm going to check it later when emerge finishes. The fastest processing for VLC - X11 video output (XCB)
in Smplayer the best best video performance is achieved with SDL driver dedicating 4 threads to video processing. I wonder what max video quality if will render without delays in this mode

Tested on 1024x720 H264 with currently 2 emerges in the background

VLC : best in X11 video output (XCB)
Smplayer : worse with X11 than VLC but outperforms VLC with SDL

I'll publish all the data on this CPU and platform so if anyone would ever want to upgrade he/she would know that money are not wasted. And I have the exact same model under Windows 7 Home with SSD and GMA3600 32bit (but with 4Gb or RAM, 3192 available) to compare.

Currently my feelings are optimistic unless it dies due to some hardware overload which I didn't notice it should work. XFCE is all so a good question - it will be tested later. LX-QT works OK, and KDE works but with amazing lags (connected to SVG processing, not depended on composition or effects, it's just SVG that makes those lags in KDE)

So far unsolved problem list:

* no DMPS in console - no way to turn off display without the graphic shell (without x11 modsetting)
* rendering lags in KDE when menus have SVG icons : working on this bug with KDE team, so far unresolved

Happy new year.

eccerr0r · Posted: Sun Dec 27, 2020 7:39 am Post subject:

Well you can have a load average of 25 but CPU doing nothing... if all 25 tasks are waiting for disk, computer can't make forward progress until one is satisfied. Though with an SSD it can be milliseconds, but it still will wait for those milliseconds starved. With an HDD it's significantly worse and hundreds of milliseconds can elapse between actual forward progress versus instructions used to queue disk requests, doing the swap LRU algorithms, and even just sitting there waiting for a disk interrupt.

Well, there shouldn't be a reason why these netbooks wouldn't work other than that they're slow (and for me, the display resolution is fairly poor*). I'm still using my eeePC 901 and it's got half the cores, though it does build everything fine. I do leave it in X11 all the time, rare do I quit out of X unless I really need the memory, and the display panel does shut off when I close the lid so I'm not too concerned.

* I run one app that TBH is written so poorly that it's almost unusable on the limited resolution of the 901 (1024x600). Even Firefox works around the resolution, but seems more and more people assume high DPI/resolution displays and leaves these machines in the dust...
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lanthruster · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2012 Posts: 60

Thanks for the details.

You can try 1025c one day. It does actually work. It would even play 1080p video.... full screen which I never expected it would both in VLC and SMPLAYER. VLC requires no tuning and will play 1080p out of the box except choosing the correct driver X11 Video Driver XCB . SMPLAYER requires performance tuning. At the end - they will all play 1080p the same. I'm going to compare 1080p to windows 7 home performance 32bit with hardware GMA3600 support on the same laptop and give feedback.

Chromium, Firefox, Opera (opera as usual has a built in ffmpeg with a limited codec support) - will compile and work and play online video fine. Wine will work (5.0.3, 5.0.2 won't). I'm buried under various bugs stabilizing the netbook but those are connected to mysql-workbench and various software.

As promised I installed XFCE and confirm that it will work as fast as LXQT on 1025c. Only KDE will be slow on this netbook :-)

, fantastically slow compared to XFCE & LXQT.

But there are some bad news due to the bug:

https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16690

if both KDE & XFCE are installed and a mounted media like USB is unmounted from thunar or xfce desktop it will freeze for about 60 seconds until the notification is supposed to be displayed. The media is unmounted OK from KDE Dolphin, I suggest to use Dolphin instead of Thunar in this config until the problem is fixed and turn off automout.

Concluding KDE/XFCE/LXQT tryout on this netbook: Both XFaCE and LXQT will work fast on 1025C unlike LXQT - XFCE has the launch feedback and composition. The missing launch feedback is really annoying in otherwise cool LXQT.

Another thing to note : window mangers, both the default XFCE and KDE5 window managers have a really high title bar unlike openbox. That titlebox width leaves less usable space for the window itself.

TESTING LXQT vs XFCE:

I've just finished extensive testing of LXQT vs XFCE on 1025c and LXQT is significantly faster.... LXQT has no problems with removable medias, very quick mount/unmount, more responsive, the difference in overall performance/feel against XFCE is striking. Openbox is likely faster than XFCE window manager or I have no idea why 1080p video almost +30% of speed under LXQT against XFCE. And all so nm-manager plugin has no problems with
displaying it's icon in the tray under LXQT.

For at least this netbook - stick to LXQT if you want the maximum performance (it's really a big difference against even XFCE), if you want something more go for XFCE. KDE5 is laggy / buggy and is trailing way way way behind both of those options it's out of the league even to compare it. The compromise would be to install KDE5 and then LXQT and use KDE5 tools in LXQT - the majority of them will work without any lags under LXQT

Thumbs up to LXQT team for such an amazing desktop focused on professionals who use computer for working and for whom lags and slows sums up to
years wasted in their lives.

lanthruster · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2012 Posts: 60

follow up: as the system built/patching continues, some interesting info about 1025C Gentoo vs 1025C Windows 8, I happened to have exactly the same netbooks one is running Windows 8 32bit with 3.2Gb of RAM and the second is 4Gb Gentoo Linux AMD64 with GMA3600 kernel support, both have Intel 240gb SSD of the same model

Some conclusions:

1. Relatively non-busy Windows 8 is running 1025C about +14C average hotter than Linux Gentoo @ 25+ Load Average!! The difference is amazing.
You're going to have a MUCH cooler laptop under Gentoo anytime

2. 1025C windows hardware video support that (as advertised) allows to play FULL HD (1920 x 1280 The Expanse) video turned out to be all fake
I extensively tested 1025C Gentoo with Smplayer and XCB driver (that is for some reason cannot be chosen from the drop down menu in smplayer
but could be set manually as xcb - do it if you have the same laptop, it's much faster than xcb in VLC) is ALWAYS above 23 FPS and CPU stays BELOW
165F (74C) with LA only 5-6, verything is responsive I run Photoshop CS5, CC 2019 in Wine in foreground with Firefox and Chromium and LXQT
desktop While Windows running Chromium only is getting lags and overheats on the same video, I can't imagine how that laptop can run FULL HD
video without getting fried under Windows, the core temp rises 201+F (94+C) and up above I didn't go further (was afraid to fry the CPU)

Again thumbs up for Linux Kernel hackers who merged that GMA3600 patch into the kernel. That hack allows Linux to play Full HD better than
Windows with "hardware supported Video"

3. Firefox currently outperforms Chromium... although Chromium passes the tests with the higher marks, but in reality Firefox has much smoother user
interaction

4. The best panel for that laptop is still LX-QT, second place goes to XFCE and Plasma is unusable due to lags (localizing the problem with Plasma is still a job to do), LXQT is remarkably stable and fast.