PART 2! - Proxmox on Intel's Hybrid Big Little - IT WORKS!

Proxmox and Intel's Hybrid "big/LITTLE" architecture... the great debate continues. New discoveries and tests have prompted a second video on the subject, and trust me, you're going to want to watch this one.

But first... What am I drinking???

Pfriem (Hood River, OR) Extra Pale (6.5%)

*Links to items below may be affiliate links*

Microcode Install Instructions:
1) Install Proxmox 8.1
3) Save Changes
4) #apt clean && apt update
5) #apt install intel-microcode
- The current version Debian has in the repo is 3.2023114.1~deb12u1
6) Reboot, and the microcode patch should apply automatically.
7) You can check what microcode you are running after reboot by
# grep 'stepping\|model\|microcode' /proc/cpuinfo

Thanks to @DotBowder for the above instructions. Shoutout to @dominikcsapak as well.

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[dominikcsapak]

Wow, great update, and so soon after the first part! Big kudos @DotBowder for pinpointing this to the microcode. I did not really think about that, because we generally update our BIOS on our retail boards and have the microcode installed (Not only for stability, but also for security reasons). BTW, we already have a section in our reference documentation about the microcode if you want to link to that ( Section 3.3 Firmware Updates) It is also on our wiki. Thanks for the good work!

[wstrake]

Thanks a bunch for following up on this. This kind of actual hands-on testing and reporting of functionality - and especially your follow-up, when you got the microcode updated and stable and redid all the benchmarks, and your new findings - is incredibly valuable, harder to come by presented in such a comprehensive manner, and happens to line up with stuff I'm tinkering with right now, so, cheers!

[yvghbrg]

This was PERFECT! I support a high end gaming PC with a 13700K and two RX7600xt GPUs with Proxmox 8.1 and two VMs for my kids to split the system. I applied the code and ran Passmark CPU bench, and noticed how greatly improved the results were, and how it all balanced well. Much Kudos to Jeff for this one!

[mrhappy]

The new intro is cool and all but I really liked the old intro. Smooth jazz playing over the pint filling up, while looking like it's recharging a battery, captures your channel perfectly. WIth the new intro I'm not sure what the matrix has to do with anything, doesn't seem like a good fit. Also it's a bit too long.

[OldMadScientist]

Slightly off topic .... I recently switched from VMware Workstation to Proxmox VE. I should have made this switch years ago! I'm still a newbie on Proxmox, but I'm looking forward to learning more about Proxmox VE!

[ewenchan]

Two things:
1) Nice to see that Proxmox is able to do what Windows has been able to do, and then do it better than Windows. Always a plus.

2) re: 1x VM x 4 P-core threads -- you can test that explicitly by specifying the CPU affinity for that VM to 0, 2, 4, 6 and you should get pretty similar results where it is only just using the P-core, without HTT.

That's also assuming that you don't want to use taskset for the VM process that's running inside Proxmox 8.1 (which you can also do, if you don't specify the CPU affinity field in the Hardware -> CPU section of your VM.

[onesterkin]

The interesting part to cover in part 3 is how these boards perform in idle mode. I mean power consumption, falling into c6+ states, etc. Everyone measures performance, but my home server is idling most of time, and though I need to squeeze every GHz out of it sometimes, 80% of time its just idle and costs me $$$

And many thanks for such niche videos, it's insaly hard to find how virtualization works on these Chinese mobos

[lack]

FWIW, I've been running a 13900k in Proxmox 8.0 for nearly a year now with no instability issues. I'm not pushing the system to its limits by any means, but it runs a dozen or so VMs without issue. I'll update and apply the microcode patches soon though, won't say no to improvements.

[paulbrooks]

This jogged my memory on virtualization and right-sizing VMs compared to bare metal, and why a mid-way loaded host (with noisy neighbor VMs) is faster with a diverse workload. It's because the scheduler should be able to extract more performance during the delay intervals of other threads when they don't overlap too much. Oversubscription can still net performance to an extent when many guests are nearly idle.

[Hobbes]

I have been super happy with using 13900 (non-K) in proxmox cluster for a while now, and been super happy without modifying the scheduling.

[davidg]

This lines up with my own testing of Proxmox vs. bare metal, and it explains why I some VM results outperformed bare metal (I never investigated the why because my better results were right around margin-of-error levels at single digit percentages, though consistently so).

[thaddausduda]

I have been running the Erying i5-1250 SRLCY for almost a year now. I even started with Proxmox 7. I have multiple container VMs running 24/7 with a Tesla P4 passthrough to one of the VMs, a SATA expansion card passthrough to a second VM and a plex container with quick sync. The current runtime ist about 40 days and I never experienced any stability issues. So maby I got lucky with my board

[MrJackPL]

Great video!! I was thinking about this kind of set up inspired by your previous videos with Erying products. Please do more this kind of tests also show us part 3 with installation of this boards in your garage server :D

[Dizzydre]

I was running an i5-13500 with a w680 motherboard for quite some time with zero issues. I had the p-cores pinned to a VM that I use for gaming, and it worked well, too.

[CoryMT]

Thank you for the thorough and timely part 2!
I was salivating over the cheap 13th gen engineering sample boards from Erying in the past few days, and trying to convince myself that I have a need for one as a low power VM host. Seeing that they have potential stability issues definitely dampens my interest.

[davidwilson]

Just in time, waiting on my minisforum ms-01s to arrive. Thank you for taking the time on this

I bought the Frankenstein 12900H (no ES) immediately after the first set of videos on Erying. With their RAM and SSD, to avoid any lengthy troubleshooting steps... And I've been using it as a daily driver light "workstation" (with regular RAM and SSDs), I don't do as complex 3D as I used to, rendering is done in the GPU, since the lack of PCIE lanes isn't so much of an issue for rendering, because (I think) it loads all the textures once and doesn't shuffle them in and out like in games...? And it's been rock solid! Even bought an PCIe E-key 2.5Gb for the wifi slot (thx Wendell for the hack) and it just works under Windows! But the previous video got me worried, since my next step would be to buy an actual workstation and turn this into a low power high speed server. Now I'm so glad it works! Thank you for the info!

[wisserwolf]

Nice, Part 2 time to Watch it directly. Even its 22:51(10:51 pm) where i live (Germany). But by the way, i love your Videos.

[MichaelBoumanPegasusx]

The biggest issue I've had trying to run VMs on my erying board (non ES, 11800H) is with PCIE passthrough. I actually have an RTX A2000 12GB that fails to passthrough. Granted, I was trying to passthrough via unraid, rather than proxmox. Perhaps its time to give proxmox a go. On the previous note, however; are there any bios settings that need to be changed to enable proper passthrough on these boards?

[PeaceLuvTurtlez]

lol i just finished part one exit back to my homepage and see part 2 released 10 mins ago.... nice.