Linus builds Linus’ new PC!

[Emily Young]

Linus has built a new PC for himself, and now Linus is going to replicate it as best he can – Wait, which Linus are we talking about? Who cares, let’s build a Threadripper workstation!

 

 

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Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.

[lewdicrous]

Is it Linus Tech Tips or Linus Tech Tips?

[Guest]

10 minutes ago, lewdicrous said:

Is it Linus Tech Tips or Linus Tech Tips?

Linus Linus Tech Tips

 

 

or Linus Linus Tips

[Jae Tee]

Just 'tech tips....on to the floor'

[Tristerin]

@GabenJr this birbs for you sir.

[Nathanpete]

So obv Linus learned a lot about developer builds (at the end of the video) doing this, but would an good dev PC look like nowadays if we ignore Linus' need for a quiet system? 

He says a RX 580 is overkill, but what kind of developer like jobs would need a very good graphics card and a great CPU like a threadripper? I'm thinking people that work in game studios that take care of stuff like graphical bugs, rendering tech, and everything that has to do with how the CPU/GPU handles your personal in-game graphics settings would need a good graphics card to make sure it is fixed? 

Also what about devs that need to fix a graphics bug that is only recreatable on a specific GPU, I assume you would have to open your case, slide the suspect GPU in, and then recreate it yourself right? 

[KaratekHD]

Really nice video! It's amazing to see some more Linux related content, appears @GabenJr
has fun at the moment You all do a really good work, sth like what you do would be my dream job.

[cmtedouglas]

what was the args for the kernel compilation?

 

 

[Thadir]

41 minutes ago, Nathanpete said:

So obv Linus learned a lot about developer builds (at the end of the video) doing this, but would an good dev PC look like nowadays if we ignore Linus' need for a quiet system? 

He says a RX 580 is overkill, but what kind of developer like jobs would need a very good graphics card and a great CPU like a threadripper? I'm thinking people that work in game studios that take care of stuff like graphical bugs, rendering tech, and everything that has to do with how the CPU/GPU handles your personal in-game graphics settings would need a good graphics card to make sure it is fixed? 

Also what about devs that need to fix a graphics bug that is only recreatable on a specific GPU, I assume you would have to open your case, slide the suspect GPU in, and then recreate it yourself right? 

Your right, it depens there are library's out there thet when you have to (I have no real experiance here I deve mostly on linux with Java witch loves CPU). But there actealy whole streams of GPU specific stuff happening out there like cuda (NVIDFA) and OpenCL are a thing.

My favorite reason to have a decent GPU is Shader Showdonw coding compititions witch are real fun to watch, and very visual thanks to the idea Bonzomatic that literly, starts showing the visualisation while you code.

[Vapare]

Fedora Linux :)

[Nataska]

I hope this means you guys will start covering developer PC build guides It was super eye-opening to me when i got in the industry realizing just how beefy my work workstation needed to be to handle a large c++ solution, even before adding in the complexity of a game engine!

[RubyMiner]

It's great to see more Linux content like this! Keep it up! :D

[igormp]

Quick note: apart from the problems with nvidia, Linus probably went with AMD due to their open source driver being already built into the kernel, so it's just plug and play.

 

5 hours ago, Nathanpete said:

So obv Linus learned a lot about developer builds (at the end of the video) doing this, but would an good dev PC look like nowadays if we ignore Linus' need for a quiet system? 

He says a RX 580 is overkill, but what kind of developer like jobs would need a very good graphics card and a great CPU like a threadripper? I'm thinking people that work in game studios that take care of stuff like graphical bugs, rendering tech, and everything that has to do with how the CPU/GPU handles your personal in-game graphics settings would need a good graphics card to make sure it is fixed? 

Also what about devs that need to fix a graphics bug that is only recreatable on a specific GPU, I assume you would have to open your case, slide the suspect GPU in, and then recreate it yourself right? 

I'm on the other side of the spectrum with machine learning where I need GPU and don't really care about CPU. There are all kinds of things with different needs in this world haha

[Dirk]

@GabenJr Any chance we can get steps to reproduce the build test? Or just the command that was used? Curious to see what my setup is like.

[Shatrix]

@GabenJr

I don't know why the kernel build took that long, but probably because it's a Live image running from a USB Stick!

I just finished building the latest Linux Kernel 5.7.7 on my Convertible ultrabook HPEnvyX360 with the 8-cores 15W Ryzen 7 4700U and it finished in just 2 Minutes 53 Seconds
I used this command (8 parallel threads)
$ time make -j 8 defconfig bzImage modules 
and this is the time command output
real    2m53,190s

[Emily Young]

14 hours ago, Dirk said:

@GabenJr Any chance we can get steps to reproduce the build test? Or just the command that was used? Curious to see what my setup is like.

time make -j 64 oldconfig bzImage modules was the command used. I don't recall now if we grabbed the same kernel revision as Fedora (5.6 IIRC) or the latest 5.7 branch.

[igormp]

19 minutes ago, Shatrix said:

I don't know the kernel build took that long, but probably because it's a Live image running from a USB Stick!

I just finished building the latest Linux Kernel 5.7.7 on my Convertible ultrabook HPEnvyX360 with the 8-cores 15W Ryzen 7 4700U and it finished in just 2 Minutes 53 Seconds
I used this command (8 parallel threads)
$ time make -j 8 defconfig bzImage modules 
and this is the time command output
real    2m53,190s

Yeah, the test was flawed. Even a 3900x nets sub minute compile times, while a threaripper should be able to do so in less than 30 seconds

[Shatrix]

On 7/3/2020 at 7:48 PM, Shatrix said:

@GabenJr

I don't know why the kernel build took that long, but probably because it's a Live image running from a USB Stick!

I just finished building the latest Linux Kernel 5.7.7 on my Convertible ultrabook HPEnvyX360 with the 8-cores 15W Ryzen 7 4700U and it finished in just 2 Minutes 53 Seconds
I used this command (8 parallel threads)
$ time make -j 8 defconfig bzImage modules 
and this is the time command output
real    2m53,190s

@GabenJr will you answer me, anytime soon?  

[HellAlex]

After watching the video I heard a question or a topic that have arise: "What developers want (need)?" (talking for PC configuration and peripherals). And as a such guy - working in the IT industry as an automation engineer, I want to shed a little bit of light on the topic.

 

The short answer is - it depends. Depends what is the daily load and what is needed. Most of the time the compilation or rendering is done by remote servers on periodic time intervals, which also report back to the developer and his whole team.

 

So for start the infrastructure is the following:
- Task manager - most common used applications for this are Atlassian Jira, Trello and other platforms with similar capabilities.
- Code repository - this is the place where everything goes, all the code, all the bugs and stuff. For applications (or platforms) are used Atlassian Bitbucket, GitHub, or Maven repositories. There the code is easily accessible, editable and fixable.

- Build manager - here a comes the remote server which performs the heavy lifting operations - building (compiling) the project. For applications are used Jenkins, Atlassian Bamboo and similar. Configurations on build plan depends on how often a commit is made to the code repository. It could be daily, hourly, 15 min or even after each commit. Most of those servers have a lot resources - memory, CPU, storage; it is common problem in big or product oriented companies this storage to end up quickly/
- Code analysis - this tool might not be available at each code infrastructure and most of the time is used for resolving easily catchable bugs.

And that's it... So let's go back to the main question. As I already mentioned it depends:
- Depends where you are located or need to be located. And how often you need to travel. You can't bring a 10 kg. machine each time you need to fix the client server 5000 km. from home.
- Depends what type of work you need to do. If you are frontend developer or a backend developer or even if you are a game developer.

So let's first focus on the second topic and start with a frontend/backend developer (engineer). The most useful parameters in such system are: CPU, memory, network bandwidth. In most scenarios a 16 core CPU and 16GB of memory will do the job just perfect. Graphics card? - No, my friend. The most demanding applications you will ever run will be Chrome and an IDE (IntelliJ IDEA for example). From here the following can be used as tests for "real" development load:
- Compiling a program - Linux kernel, Mozzila Firefox, Chromium. Those are good tests, but very rarely the whole thing is build. Most of the time only a module and its dependencies are build. For example, if you make development only on the authentication, most likely is to build a validation, database and encryption module.
- Compiling a project - Here you can take basically every "Hello World" program written in every language, but you won't be able to determine any performance as such program compile time is under 1 second (for HTML - 0 seconds). Here I would suggest to go with Spring boot empty project, even if it contains only a single page or go with Angular introduction project (this is quite a good one, especially on the first run with Node). And lastly you can try with default WordPress project. The only condition here is that each of those builds (compiles) need to run on the local machine and completes under 5 minutes - successfully. Everything above 5 min. mark is considered to be taken by the build manager (server).

Now let's go to the other point, where you are a game developer. Here I might give you false information, so please the rest of the developers on the forum help me out. A friend of mine is working in one of the companies created the game engine behind Black Desert Online. By his words, a graphic video card is needed to offload some of the calculations (if not all of them) to it and still have a usable system, but he haven't talk about what graphic card is needed. I would put my bet on Quadro series.

On the topic of storage. I think the sweet 512GB of SSD storage are perfect - great capacity and price.

 

If you are not travelling a lot, you will be just fine with a small form factor machine hooked at the back of your monitor. Otherwise a compact and portable solution is required - laptop.

And we reached the last factor - peripherals:
- Good display - 60Hz, around 24-27" FullHD is the sweet spot (at least for me). If there are two of them - perfect. It doesn't need to have colour accuracy, it just need to be easy on the eyes and not straining them. Single or widescreen monitors are not common and sometimes is hard to maintain the boundaries of used applications.
- Good keyboard - just need to have a good typing experience. Personally I am keen on low-profile standard keyboards (backlight is optional).
- Good mouse - anything with at least 3200 dpi is enough.

 

And as a bonus... Here is my setup. The company have provided me with Dell Precision 5520 equipped with Intel 7th Gen i7, 32GB memory, Quadro P1000 and 1TB Samsung NVMe drive. While I am at the office, I use a docking station with 2x Dell 24" monitors combined with Logitech K380 keyboard and M590 mouse. That way when I unplug the laptop I can easily go to meetings or catch a plane to a customer.

Edited July 8, 2020 by HellAlex

[phxwolf]

What an amazing video. I love the focus on Developers and not all about gaming builds.  

[SVThuh]

On 7/3/2020 at 1:48 PM, Shatrix said:

@GabenJr

I don't know why the kernel build took that long, but probably because it's a Live image running from a USB Stick!

I just finished building the latest Linux Kernel 5.7.7 on my Convertible ultrabook HPEnvyX360 with the 8-cores 15W Ryzen 7 4700U and it finished in just 2 Minutes 53 Seconds
I used this command (8 parallel threads)
$ time make -j 8 defconfig bzImage modules 
and this is the time command output
real    2m53,190s

I just re-watched this video and it had me curious on how my G14 Zephy 4900U laptop would do in comparison. 

 

Result:

real    1m59.148s
user    12m33.836s
sys    1m56.374s

 

I am also using a live image running off a USB (3.0) stick.  I Dont know why there was such a disparity between your, mine and thier results.

[Shatrix]

On 11/4/2020 at 2:50 AM, SVThuh said:

I just re-watched this video and it had me curious on how my G14 Zephy 4900U laptop would do in comparison. 

 

Result:

real    1m59.148s
user    12m33.836s
sys    1m56.374s

 

I am also using a live image running off a USB (3.0) stick.  I Dont know why there was such a disparity between your, mine and thier results.

I believe you mean 4900H, right?

And it's much more powerful than mine, the R7 4700U. 

So it makes sense that it can finish the compilation in less time than my laptop!

 

But for the video, I don't really know what was wrong there, it makes no sense.