Linux experience on GA-E2100N
(rev. 1.0) with AMD E1-2100 SoC.
Xubuntu 14.10.
Hardware:
Gigabyte GA-E2100N (rev. 1.0) board
CHIEFTEC IX-01B-90W mini-ITX case with 90W power supply.
GeIL PC10600 4GB CL9-9-9 D3-1333 (GN34GB1333C9S)
Kingston V300 120GB
HDMI cable
HD-ready TV (1360x768)
Logitech K400r wireless keyboard with touchpad
TP-Link TL-WN722N USB wifi adapter
BIOS options to note:
Fast Boot: Disabled (when left Fast and Ultra fast the board does not respond on reboot and required BIOS CMOS clear jumper to be set to restore normal operation)
Secure boot: disabled
Enabled EFI only in all options (disabled all legacy stuff).
On-board COM, LPT, LAN, Audio codec: disabled.
OS, minimal settings:
Xubuntu 14.10, installation USB stick in EFI mode.
Launched live, started
GParted and created EFI boot partition (200MiB), system (25GiB), swap (512MiB) and storage partitions, left ~8GiB unallocated for SSD overprovisioning.
Launched installation, selected all partitions as created by GParted ("something else" menu option).
After reboot disabled Light-locker, Compositor, installed Synaptic, made sure mesa-vdpau drivers installed, installed mpv for video playback, modified /etc/fstab to contain "discard,relatime" options for root and storage partitions to optimize for SSD.
"~/.mpv/config" contains:
hwdec=vdpau
This line makes mpv use 5-10% CPU for 720p x264 videos, 60-100% otherwise.
Edited line in the "/etc/pulse/default.pa" to contain:
load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0
(added "tsched=0" argument to fix sound over HDMI issue (crackles, stutter).
Kodi (XBMC)
Enabled VDPAU acceleration only. Still uses too much CPU (~30-50% per core), without VDPAU uses 100%.
Problems
Heavy CPU usage in Kodi/XBMC.
Proprietary Catalyst drivers give poor performance for video playback, better stay with default Gallium3D.
No hardware acceleration for youtube, HTML5 videos, flash, although firefox is quite responsive.
Success
Low CPU usage with VDPAU in "mpv", very fast seeking times in any video file, no problems in playback.
Sauerbraten/cube is fast to start and very responsive, playable at 30 FPS with all effects at 1360x768 fullscreen.
Summary:
Max 71 C Core temparature at constant CPU load, 65 C at idle (neither fans in the case, nor CPU fan used, absolutely silent passive-cooled system), BIOS shows 55C CPU and 40C motherboard temperature values, touched the heatsink, and can confirm -- it is just warm, not burning.
Quite responsive system with good multithreading (2 cores), although takes a lot of time to compile C/C++ code.
All the hardware automatically detected and worked out of the box, small tweaks required. Perfect hardware for a Linux installation.
