Parallella Community

Given how underpowered the Zinq seems to be, I suggest you crank an image with all guis off by default unless the user explicitly turns one on, until the team has the time to do the optimization work to improve performance. Otherwise all-but-really-dedicated users will try it once, say "this sucks", toss it into a corner, and never get to the Epiphany reason for getting it in the first place.

Dan

Dan,

A couple of inputs from...apologies if I misunderstood your setup:

-Totally agree that Unity is unusable with the Zynq as it stands today. This is why we ship created the ISO currently on the FTP site with uses gnome classic without visual effects and it is "good enough" to develop code with imho.
-For some reason the vncserver uses the unity environment..we still have to explore why.
-The Zynq will not do well on graphics because it doesn't offer openGL hardware acceleration. People who expect this from the Parallella board will be disappointed. This is why I was so excited about @shodruky's attempt at using the raspi for graphics acceleration.
-Are you intending to run this a graphical desktop or with a 'ssh' type bare server model?

Andreas

Andreas:

As far as I'm concerned, all I want is ssh with all GUIs turned off for maximum performance, all running MPICH2 for Beowulf clusters of user-controlled sizes.

But if you boot with a fresh image, ssh into it, ps shows some GUI is already alive even before issuing the vncserver command (which with the console broken I thought was my only option if nmap doesn't see them on the network, which seems to happen frequently).

Till Diana mentioned serial today, so I'll try hooking those 3 TX/RX/GND pins up to a usb-serial adapter tonight. Might be good to document that on the quick-start page so that gen1 users with broken consoles won't have to search thru the forum for details and find gen0 users that had to hack it in.

Also look at dmesg at the bluetooth respawning that slows down the boot completion.

Dan

Hi, I have optimized my Ubuntu on Parallella, and it became faster!!



Try it out!!

Thanks! Dumped the GUI and the other recommended fixes, and it definitely made everything a lot crisper. The ssh session was slugging so badly before that even removing bluetooth took 15 minutes.

So why is this left as an exercise for the user to slog thru? Now you have two cleaned up images: one "desktop"with lxde and other GUI optimizations like Firefox cache etc, one "server" core stuff cli-only with all GUI removed. (Kind of like Ubuntu releases themselves, a desktop version and a server version?) Then just add these instructions in reverse to the quick-start guide so people can turn on stuff they want that's off by default for performance. Hope to see these on the ftp site soon.

Dan

I find this weird ... I mean I have the defaut image that was on the SD and SSH isn't sluggish at all, it works very well even with the bluetooth and Xorg stuff still running, there is some memory used but no CPU used.

Are you using a good SD card ? (i.e. brandname like sandisk and with UHS rating or class 10 at least)

All those processes were definitely affecting responsiveness in ssh, not just the startup inaddr dns query timeout. For example, it would take ~5 seconds to return from an edit session, and apt-gets would take forever (like 15 min to uninstall bluetooth). Made the Ubuntu 13 Zotac AMD E2-1800 SoC I use for access seem like speed demon by comparison.