Intel Optane works fine on Linux

[vanished]

1 hour ago, The Benjamins said:

would the mklink trick work to allow steam to run and install games from my NAS?

 

my NAS is D:\ but in steam i cant see that drive letter to add a folder to install games to.

 

If i ever do this I will have a 10Gb connection to it.

Perhaps.  It should work perfectly unless valve has gone out of their way to detect and prevent using that method.

[AnonymousGuy]

13 hours ago, leadeater said:

Low queue depth, which is most desktop usage, Optane is much faster than NVMe NAND SSDs. When you start increasing the queue you can spread the I/O across the NAND chips giving a higher throughput but if you're doing lots of small things Optane will be faster. Will you actually notice, probably not.

900p is supposed to be about 5x or more faster than the 960 Pro in 4K random workloads at QD1.  I don't see how it won't be noticeable.

[leadeater]

11 minutes ago, AnonymousGuy said:

900p is supposed to be about 5x or more faster than the 960 Pro in 4K random workloads at QD1.  I don't see how it won't be noticeable.

Well I was more meaning in general user perception, it's very unlikely it'll be noticeable. Not like going from HDD to SSD where there was a huge I/O bottleneck.  

[samiscool51]

On 2017-5-16 at 8:26 AM, Sniperfox47 said:

(bump)

why wouldn't it? it does it own thing and leaves the OS alone, the os doesn't know it's files are stored in two locations

the fact that a linux distro works is common sense, also when a new hardware is being developed, a linux distro is used because the os allows the dev to interact with the hardware and change values on the fly with some more advanced distros...

i wouldn't be surprised that Intel developed the hardware on linux to get the base device working, then switched over to windows to refine the device and fix any problems with it and how it works on a windows environment

[Sniperfox47]

10 hours ago, samiscool51 said:

why wouldn't it? it does it own thing and leaves the OS alone, the os doesn't know it's files are stored in two locations

the fact that a linux distro works is common sense, also when a new hardware is being developed, a linux distro is used because the os allows the dev to interact with the hardware and change values on the fly with some more advanced distros...

i wouldn't be surprised that Intel developed the hardware on linux to get the base device working, then switched over to windows to refine the device and fix any problems with it and how it works on a windows environment

Because the OS does know. Optane works via Intel SRT and Intel SRT works via a special paging module in Windows and is a Windows exclusive technology. The applications may not be aware that the file they opened may or may not be cached, but the OS definitely is since it's handled at a filesystem level.l

 

And as far as Intel had indicated prior to the fact it *only* worked with SRT. Even now it doesn't work with Linux as an SRT cache since SRT is Windows only. It works as a standard NVMe drive, and you'd have to set up your own caching method.

[Sniperfox47]

17 hours ago, zMeul said:

"works fine" is actually disingenuous since the Intel Optane Memory m.2 module was built specifically as caching and not as a standalone SSD

Sorry for the delayed reply. Didn't see your message. I'm sorry you feel it's disingenuous but it does work just fine as a caching drive under Linux. It doesn't work with Intel SRT since that's a Windows exclusive software/firmware feature, but on Linux it works fine with any number of other solutions including bcache and bcachefs, without the need for firmware hacks like SRT, and still benefits from the low latency access in the same way as SRT under Windows.

[Sniperfox47]

For anybody who's curious I just got my 32GB module and reran the tests he ran on the 16GB module. My read results are absolutely spectacular, and even my write results are *much* better than the 16GB module: http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1706156-TR-1705151TR16

 

Keeping in mind I'm running a different motherboard than Michael, and have substantially more ram (not that it should matter too much since it's a direct unbuffered storage test), it does give a general sense of where the drive falls.

 

My read tests hit nearly 1.5x the results for both the 950 Pro and 16GB Optane module, with my write results being basically double his results for the 16GB and 85% the performance of the 950 pro.

 

Keeping in mind this is still a tiny 32GB drive vs the relatively much larger 256GB 950 Pro is super exciting. The read performance of this is absolutely magnificent, and at lower queue depths the 32GB optane module smokes the 950 pro at both reads, and writes.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

On 5/16/2017 at 4:51 AM, ARikozuM said:

You can install Windows on it. People are misinformed. Windows 10 and Kaby Lake w/ appropriate chipset are required to utilize the caching function. Otherwise, it acts as a normal M.2 NVMe.

You bet I'm misinformed!  Based on to the Optane reviews so far, my understanding was that Optane could only be used as a cache drive at the moment, and that Optane-based "general purpose" SSDs would come later. In other words: Optane only works as cache drive, and only works in Win 10 Kaby Lake.

 

Now you are telling me something quite different: it already is a general purpose SSD, and only that (dubiously useful) cache-drive function is restricted to Win10/KL. If what you are saying is true, then yes, we've been mislead big time (insert Morgan Freeman here ). Although I could understand Intel not wanting to stress general purpose SSD too much, since you need larger drives for that, and Optane is still much more expensive than regular SSDs...

[Sniperfox47]

3 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

You bet I'm misinformed!  Based on to the Optane reviews so far, my understanding was that Optane could only be used as a cache drive at the moment, and that Optane-based "general purpose" SSDs would come later. In other words: Optane only works as cache drive, and only works in Win 10 Kaby Lake.

 

Now you are telling me something quite different: it already is a general purpose SSD, and only that (dubiously useful) cache-drive function is restricted to Win10/KL. If what you are saying is true, then yes, we've been mislead big time (insert Morgan Freeman here ). Although I could understand Intel not wanting to stress general purpose SSD too much, since you need larger drives for that, and Optane is still much more expensive than regular SSDs...

Yeah. I can confirm that you can install Windows on it fine too.

 

It works as a standard nVME drive, and even as an SRT cache, without even needing Optane support on your motherboard BIOS (at least on a z270 board) since my Classified K didn't even have the update for Optane support.

 

The only thing that doesn't work without Optane BIOS support is Optane Accelerator mode, which seems to be what it's made for. I can only guess here but it seems to be an alternate version of SRT with a different caching scheme to take advantage of the ridiculously low latency and high speed.

 

Just to note as well, Optane Accelerator mode only works on Windows (via the RST driver or a standalone driver), and works:

A) only on your boot drive

And B) only if it's a mechanical hard drive. Period.

 

If you want to use Optane with an SSD or with a non-boot drive it has to be via traditional SRT on Windows.

 

Currently done all my tinkering with it in Windows. Probably gonna wind up using it as a bcache cache for the hard drive in my Fedora based media server.

 

If anybody has any questions, or things you'd like me to test and report back on though, feel free to ask!