Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

ewaller · 2014-05-13 15:53:47

vanja_z wrote:

Another note is that the laptop is juuuust slightly warm to touch when idle under Arch but stone cold under OS X.

The proof is in the pudding. That heat is coming from somewhere

It reminds me of a discussion I had in college amongst some friends. Some of us were engineers, others were physicists. We were discussing how microwave ovens work. There was discussion about the polar nature of water molecules and the torque applied to those molecules by e-fields and a changing b-fields. There was discussion about plastics and that they are dielectrics, and the work done on the hysteresis loops when changing voltages were applied to those dielectrics at the 1 GHz-ish frequencies.

In the end, the engineers noted you put 1 kWatt in, and as the heat load on the room was significantly lower than that, the energy had to end up as heat in the food

Last edited by ewaller (2014-05-13 15:54:51)

regulament · 2014-05-13 16:12:04

DrKillPatient wrote:

With regards to the screen-blanking problem: do you have "acpi_backlight=vendor" in your kernel boot line? I had a similar issue a while ago that was fixed by adding that, though for me it only occurred after changing the resolution (plus it would get stuck like that across multiple boots). Still, maybe it's related? The other symptoms seem similar.

I doubt it. As I understand, acpi_backlight=vendor( BTW, just that or also Xorg configuration?) just controls the brightness of the screen. Shouldn't everything work ok, but with the screen blank? So starting a terminal, writing "sudo reboot" and entering the password should have an effect. In my case there was nothing happening. And I am confident I can do that without seeing what's on the screen.

I could try it, but I want to be sure it's not in vain.

Last edited by regulament (2014-05-13 16:13:12)

hrod · 2014-05-19 11:20:21

regulament wrote:

I just started experiencing a weird issue. From time to time( twice since Friday, three times in total) the screen goes all black, with some pixels on the left on( no clear pattern).

a similar thing has been happening for me: the screen goes all black, on the left side of the screen there is a whole column of rectangles, maybe 5px wide by 10px high, and they flash different colours, red, yellow, green

the reproduction is consistent for me though:
- boot up computer into linux and do stuff for as long as i want without any problems
- close the lid for a few minutes (enough to sleep)
- open the lid and after a few minutes, without fail the screen goes black and the column of coloured rectangles appear.

i have 11,2 (iris pro only with latest stable kernel and drivers)

Last edited by hrod (2014-05-19 11:20:49)

lmatoso · 2014-05-19 12:48:29

Hello guys,

Im about to buy laptop and im between a Macbook Pro 11,2 or a T440s.
I really like the macbook hardware, but the laptop should be a like linux only machine.
The question is: do you guys recommend this for linux only use?

How long the battery lasts on this?

regulament · 2014-05-19 13:52:45

For me the black screen issue does not always happen after I put the laptop to sleep. It's really random. That's what's weird.

I do recommend it. Just don't expect a workstation. It's a thin and light notebook with a big screen and good battery life( 8 hours with light use- check the thread for details). As soon as you start a VM it will get warm. And because it's made from aluminum warm is rather hot. The keyboard is never hot, nor the palm-rest. But the back, especially the upper side do become hot.

The SSD is a bit slow because of the NCQ problem. The HDPI screen might need some work.

Other than that, it's perfect( at least for me). Just know what to expect.

Last edited by regulament (2014-05-19 15:00:41)

hrod · 2014-05-20 05:51:30

lmatoso wrote:

The question is: do you guys recommend this for linux only use?
How long the battery lasts on this?

Well Greg KH uses it as his machine for all the linux kernel work. But yeah as regulament said, know what to expect.

If you are just going to use terminals + chrome like i do, then the resolution does not cause any issues as i just set chrome scaling to 175%, and all text looks great. But if you are going to use many gui programs you might get annoyed with the resolution.

Battery for me is great because i use terminals + i3 + chromium without flash + 10-20% brightness as i'm inside. I average around 9watt usage which should give 10.5 hours on the 95Whr battery, and i find i end up getting 8-9hours due to misc stuff (occasional compiling, flash in google-chrome...).

Wifi drivers are not official so the speed is slower than under osx, though reliability hasn't been an issue for me. Bootloader / installation is a bit finicky on macs (if you decide to leave osx).

I followed the dd test on arch linux ssd benchmarking page and got (osx was about 700write / 950read): 490MB/s wirte, 545MB/s read, 5.5GB/s buffer re-read

regulament · 2014-05-21 17:24:46

Guys, what kind of speeds do you get using the Thunderbolt-to-Ethernet adapter?

I don't have an AC router yet so for large data transfers I turn to cable. On OS X I get the expected speeds of about 1Gbps( around 120 MB/s).

On Linux though, I can't get above 40 MB/s( and it's not the SSD because I save to RAM). I tried torrents, multiple speed tests, wget, multiple wgets without any success.

Are there any optimizations or options I do not know about? I checked the speed of the interface with ethtool and it's 1000 so it should work.

Do any of you have AC routers and get better speeds? I'll just get a new router if that's the case.

chutsu · 2014-05-22 12:21:40

To add to the blank-screen problem I've tried setting X screen saver off with `xset` in multiple different ways like turning dmps off, blank off etc. The only thing that seems to work for me at the moment is using XFCE which the problem does not seem to happen there.

hrod · 2014-05-23 04:20:27

regulament wrote:

Guys, what kind of speeds do you get using the Thunderbolt-to-Ethernet adapter?

I did some tests pic:
osx: tb-eth afs = 98.8MB/sec (probably maxing out the hdds in the nas)
linux: tb-eth nfs = 73.11MB/sec
osx: 802.11n 5ghz 300Mb/s wifi = 29.4MB/sec
linux: 802.11n 2.4ghz 300Mb/s wifi = 13.59MB/sec

for some reason linux does not like my 5ghz, but will connect to other 5ghz (using 5th gen airport extreme), i'm getting a AC1900 router (wrt1900ac or r7000) in a few weeks

Last edited by hrod (2014-05-23 09:00:38)

hrod · 2014-05-23 09:07:47

lspci -v -s 00:02.0 seems to suggest i have 256M VRAM and osx has recently been upped from 1024MB to 1536MB

does anyone know if it's possible to increase the maximum VRAM under linux? half the web results are about virtual ram not video ram and the rest conclude in 'increase the bios setting', however windows shows 1792MB VRAM which makes me think that it is not restricted to the bios setting (which i don't think we can change)

regulament · 2014-05-23 20:54:34

hrod wrote:

regulament wrote:
Guys, what kind of speeds do you get using the Thunderbolt-to-Ethernet adapter?
I did some tests pic:
osx: tb-eth afs = 98.8MB/sec (probably maxing out the hdds in the nas)
linux: tb-eth nfs = 73.11MB/sec
osx: 802.11n 5ghz 300Mb/s wifi = 29.4MB/sec
linux: 802.11n 2.4ghz 300Mb/s wifi = 13.59MB/sec
for some reason linux does not like my 5ghz, but will connect to other 5ghz (using 5th gen airport extreme), i'm getting a AC1900 router (wrt1900ac or r7000) in a few weeks

Ok, so it's something on my part. Thanks a lot for doing all the tests!

LE: So the black screen issue happened again, but this time while I was streaming music with mplayer. Screen went black, everything unresponsive as always, but the music also went on a short loop( about 5 seconds of music were being looped). Everything was unresponsive, could not do anything to the music.

I think this proves that there is a deeper issue at fault.

Last edited by regulament (2014-05-23 22:07:31)

chutsu · 2014-05-26 02:29:59

regulament: what desktop/window environment are you using?

regulament · 2014-05-26 08:21:17

I am using bspwm, why?

Last edited by regulament (2014-05-26 08:21:39)

fixel · 2014-05-26 15:09:23

I downgraded to the last 3.13 version of the kernel. This solves the black screen (with rgb lines on the left) problem. Not that this is a permanent solution, I believe my laptop ran better on 3.14 (temperature wise).

EDIT: wordz

Last edited by fixel (2014-05-26 15:09:49)

gauteh · 2014-06-04 07:32:35

I've posted my setup here with a Macbook Pro Late 2013, 13" with LXDE / Openbox: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 0#p1422100

Sc0rian · 2014-06-16 22:46:07

does anyone have wake up issues?

I run XFCE. When I close the lid, the laptop goes to sleep. When I open it, it wakes up, but then hangs whilst deciding to go back to sleep. I then have to push the power button and can finally login.

Anyone know a fix for this? Resume/suspend always seems flaky

gauteh · 2014-06-18 09:35:11

Sc0rian wrote:

does anyone have wake up issues?
I run XFCE. When I close the lid, the laptop goes to sleep. When I open it, it wakes up, but then hangs whilst deciding to go back to sleep. I then have to push the power button and can finally login.
Anyone know a fix for this? Resume/suspend always seems flaky

Is your XFCE updated? there used to be problems with systemd events, maybe they are both reacting.. Note that if you have an external monitor connected the laptop shouldn't go to sleep.

Sc0rian · 2014-06-18 10:49:30

gauteh wrote:

Sc0rian wrote:
does anyone have wake up issues?
I run XFCE. When I close the lid, the laptop goes to sleep. When I open it, it wakes up, but then hangs whilst deciding to go back to sleep. I then have to push the power button and can finally login.
Anyone know a fix for this? Resume/suspend always seems flaky
Is your XFCE updated? there used to be problems with systemd events, maybe they are both reacting.. Note that if you have an external monitor connected the laptop shouldn't go to sleep.

well I am running version from the official place https://www.archlinux.org/groups/x86_64/xfce4/

My laptop goes to sleep when I have a external monitor connected. Even when I have "nothing" set in power options..

regulament · 2014-06-18 11:07:38

I just got a new AC wireless router and I don't seem to be able to get past 30Mbps download speed in Linux although in OS X it works.

sudo iw dev wlp2s0 link:

Connected to ***** (on wlp2s0)
	SSID: ****
	freq: 5240
	signal: -39 dBm
	tx bitrate: 400.0 MBit/s

iwconfig wlp2s0:

wlp2s0    IEEE 802.11abg  ESSID:"*****"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:5.24 GHz  Access Point: E0:3F:49:F2:76:F4   
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:on

ifconfig:

wlp2s0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.1.4  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.1.255
        inet6 fe80::7a31:c1ff:fec9:36f8  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ether 78:31:c1:c9:36:f8  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 1235684  bytes 1633005697 (1.5 GiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 3  overruns 0  frame 18311
        TX packets 846746  bytes 759368959 (724.1 MiB)
        TX errors 2  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0
        device interrupt 18

Does AC work for any of you? If yes, how did you set yours up?

EDIT: I have failed. It was a router setting. I can confirm that now I have similar wireless speeds to OS X.

Last edited by regulament (2014-06-19 14:39:27)

Sc0rian · 2014-06-22 22:41:23

does anyone have high IO waits still?

I still get them, when opening chrome I got terrible slow IO hangs (watching iotop). Is there any tweaks I can do??

I have removed libata.force=noncq

regulament · 2014-06-24 23:06:12

No noticeable hangs here. Speeds seem ok here( might be wrong at reading the stats, I am still new to this):

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=testFile bs=8M count=500

500+0 records in
500+0 records out
4194304000 bytes (4.2 GB) copied, 4.37869 s, 958 MB/s

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=testFile1 bs=8M count=500

500+0 records in
500+0 records out
4194304000 bytes (4.2 GB) copied, 5.32428 s, 788 MB/s

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=testFile2 bs=8M count=500

500+0 records in
500+0 records out
4194304000 bytes (4.2 GB) copied, 5.22796 s, 802 MB/s

With a higher count:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=testFile11 bs=8M count=1000

1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
8388608000 bytes (8.4 GB) copied, 12.1054 s, 693 MB/s

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=testFile12 bs=8M count=1000

1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
8388608000 bytes (8.4 GB) copied, 14.035 s, 598 MB/s

Also, iotop report while downloading something from usenet with about 45-50MiB/s: PasteBin.

LE: Tests done on a 11,2 with the 512GB SSD.

Last edited by regulament (2014-06-24 23:12:41)

hrod · 2014-06-27 21:22:13

when i wake up the display after it goes black, the brightness is set very high, seems to be similar to the brightness at boot (which is whatever brightness osx last had), does anyone know where (some config file or something) i can put a command to one of the back-light utilities that would be executed after 'waking up' the display

using i3 sometimes switching work-spaces freezes, then when i can switch sections where chromium is don't render, then it all comes back after a while - this might be io waits, i'll look into this more soon (are there any particularly helpful tests i could do?)

Last edited by hrod (2014-07-02 13:00:08)

aaronlevin · 2014-07-02 15:35:31

Anyone occasionally getting a kworker thread pinning the CPU at 100%? Running powertop seems to indicate it's related to acpi_os_execute_deferred.

I've got things mostly working pretty good (time is the only thing that doesn't seem to work well).

Another customization thing: I've got multiple monitors at work, I'm running XMonad, and I can't seem to get my terminal to look good on both the mac monitor and the external monitors. The font is tiny on the mac and way too huge on the external monitors. It seems like I need some kind of context-aware terminal setting. Is this possible, or am I complectifying something that has an obvious solution?

Thanks!

aaronlevin · 2014-07-02 21:58:53

Update to my previous post: I've been able to confirm that as soon as I connect either the HDMI or Thunderbolt adapter, a kworker processed is launched and pins one of the CPUs at 100%. Looking at the "stacks" for those work processes shows lots of gmux activity.

Anyone encounter this?

Sc0rian · 2014-07-04 11:13:37

aaronlevin wrote:

Update to my previous post: I've been able to confirm that as soon as I connect either the HDMI or Thunderbolt adapter, a kworker processed is launched and pins one of the CPUs at 100%. Looking at the "stacks" for those work processes shows lots of gmux activity.
Anyone encounter this?

nope gave that a go and dont have that problem.

Although, I do have another problem.

I want to run 3 monitors... I can run 2 X on dp and 1 X laptop.

I cannot run 2 X dp 1 X hdmi.. For some reason one of the DP's get kicked off when I plugin HDMI, and it cannot be seen in xrandr.

Would this be a intel drive issue?

Last edited by Sc0rian (2014-07-04 11:14:05)

Arch Linux

#226 2014-05-13 15:53:47

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#227 2014-05-13 16:12:04

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#228 2014-05-19 11:20:21

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#229 2014-05-19 12:48:29

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#230 2014-05-19 13:52:45

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#231 2014-05-20 05:51:30

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#232 2014-05-21 17:24:46

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#233 2014-05-22 12:21:40

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#234 2014-05-23 04:20:27

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#235 2014-05-23 09:07:47

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#236 2014-05-23 20:54:34

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#237 2014-05-26 02:29:59

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#238 2014-05-26 08:21:17

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#239 2014-05-26 15:09:23

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#240 2014-06-04 07:32:35

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#241 2014-06-16 22:46:07

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#242 2014-06-18 09:35:11

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#243 2014-06-18 10:49:30

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#244 2014-06-18 11:07:38

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#245 2014-06-22 22:41:23

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#246 2014-06-24 23:06:12

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#247 2014-06-27 21:22:13

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#248 2014-07-02 15:35:31

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#249 2014-07-02 21:58:53

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

#250 2014-07-04 11:13:37

Re: Macbook Pro Late 2013 Retina

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