Review of Linux on Minisforum V3 AMD Ryzen Tablet | Hacker News Reader

Review of Linux on Minisforum V3 AMD Ryzen Tablet

mudkip.me

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This is a highly intriguing device, but if it's to replace a MacBook or especially an iPad, battery life is going to have to be a great deal better. I'd be willing to sacrifice some raw muscle if that's what it takes to achieve that – even if it "only" performed as well as the original M1, that'd be more than enough if that meant also life north of the 12 hour mark.

Though it's not mentioned in the review, good standby time is also important. Not only is it irritating to find one's tablet/laptop dead when pulled out for use, the sleeping battery drain typical of x86 laptops since the advent of "modern" standby runs through your battery's cycles much more quickly than necessary.

It would be great to have more ARM devices which support linux, but until there is a common ARM boot process that everyone follows and the situation with device trees and propriety driver binaries gets solved, x86 is going to have to be the way to go for most Linux first devices. With x86 you can basically load any distro you want with ease no matter what the CPU.

Perhaps 2024 is The Year (tm) of Arm SystemReady laptops based on Qualcomm.

Given how Qualcomm is responsible for ARM MS Surfaces being "not really compliant" with even what Microsoft mandated...

... I won't hold my breath for Qualcomm to be bringer of SystemReady. I might end up too blue.

> ARM MS Surfaces being "not really compliant" with even what Microsoft mandated...

2024 Microsoft Surface?

Yeah, there's some bullshit about device trees vs. ACPI.

Maybe Next Year!

Haven't checked 2024 one, but previous ones were borked by Qualcomm essentially missing bits of ACPI runtime handling, EFI variable storage not actually existing at runtime, and Qualcomm papering over it in Windows with drivers that hijacked the proper interfaces.

So Linux-on-ARM-Surface had a lot of magical thinking involving using device tree etc. caused by people hitting the wall with broken UEFI implementation.

For any if the problems mentioned in the parent's post, ARM would not be any any better. Failure to enter sleep is a software problem, usually not a hardware one. If anything it would be worst; note how most of these posts tend to look at firmware sleep modes with rosy glasses.

I remember excited by the brith of ARM desktop capable systems. Sadly the industry chose not to standardise and I have given up on ARM desktop and even Single Board Computers. SBCs have been replaced by x86 boxes. x86 is a breath of fresh air with mainline kernel support, loads of features, support just about every device imaginable and efficiency is quite good on the lower end CPUs.

There is a common-ish boot process, it's just not commonly implemented alas, except sort of in servers.

> ACPI can be used for Armv8 and Armv9 systems designed to follow the BSA (Arm Base System Architecture) [0] and BBR (Arm Base Boot Requirements) [1] specifications. Both BSA and BBR are publicly accessible documents. Arm Servers, in addition to being BSA compliant, comply with a set of rules defined in SBSA (Server Base System Architecture).

https://docs.kernel.org/arch/arm64/arm-acpi.html

There's people in the ecosystem doing good things, but wow been a decade now of ARM ecosystem forever being ever-so-close to doing the right thing & learning from the ways x86 is such an open interoperable healthy ecosystem (Intel wifi chips aside; even the "PCIe" ones no longer work in any other systems/aren't spec complaint).

So here we are a decade later & still ARM is good only in flagship (and 25% of mid-ranged) cell phones running vendor sdks and now some hyperscaler's servers, but literally no one else can use decent modern arm stuff without a bunch of fuss. What's the quote? Chips without drivers are just expensive sand?

> Not only is it irritating to find one's tablet/laptop dead when pulled out for use, the sleeping battery drain typical of x86 laptops since the advent of "modern" standby runs through your battery's cycles much more quickly than necessary.

It really blows my mind that this is the case. If Intel or AMD doesn't want their architecture to be discarded they need to fix this. They should be on full alert working on this problem, yet it seems like nobody even cares. Maybe they deserve the defeat that is coming, though I'd much prefer they learn.

IMHO it isn't an AMD or Intel problem, it is a "every driver and piece of hardware on the machine has to cooperate with low power modes" problem.

Apple owns the stack and iterates slowly.

Most laptops change to some of their chips (wifi, graphics, etc) every year. But it can easily take a couple of years of experience working with a shop and writing drivers for it to fix every power usage bug.

For many years (!!) Microsoft actually kept the same wireless chipset in their Surface machines. Was it the latest and greatest? No, but it worked!

Then or course you have software. For years Firefox had a bug where if any open tab has GPU accelerated content, it would prevent the entire machine from going to sleep.

If Microsoft clamps down on that sort of behavior it'll break someone's software (complaints about laptops going to sleep fall into 1 of 2 camps, it happens too often or it doesn't happen enough !)

I think what we're discussing is "S0 sleep" vs S3 sleep, AKA "machine stays running and pretends to sleep while hopefully saving enough power to be okay" vs "the only thing getting power is RAM and the chip(s) that will wake the machine back up when you hit a button". So yes, largely an AMD/Intel problem; while other hardware parts are somewhat relevant, they're secondary. At least, that's how I think it goes; happy to be wrong. I'm sufficiently behind the curve that all I have is second-hand accounts, including people complaining that S0 sleep doesn't even work right on Windows.

Wow I never actually thought about what is happening at the hardware level during sleep. The thought of a trickle charge going to RAM to keep the data alive while everything else sleeps is really cool.

It can really be anywhere. Intel/AMD probably have done due diligence in ensuring that the SoC itself sleeps correctly, but once system integrators start glueing on external hardware like radios, external graphics, floppy drives ( :P ), things get messy fast. For example, a wireless driver which doesn't correctly power down the radios when the system sleeps will end up firing interrupts at the SoC and dragging it back from S3 constantly. Or maybe the SoC does actually power gate correctly but the external graphics doesn't and so you end up burning a non-negligible amount of power over there for no good reason. And so on and on and on.

Integrators here are really on the hook for validating their configuration and chasing down the appropriate vendor to fix it (be it Intel/AMD or, I dunno, Qualcomm).

It all comes down to personal preference at the end, but battery life to me is overrated.

The main impact is mild inconvenience: lugging and managing an external battery, babysitting battery when needed or plugging it more than less.

That sucks, but you can deal with it. There's little way to deal with the iPad having a restricted OS with no JIT/compiling/virtualization support, or the MacBook having no touch or pen support.

Yeah, I don't know many people who spend +6hours straight in front of a computer without taking a break. This can't possibly be healthy.

Contiguous computer usage can sometimes be a nice benefit of long battery life, but I believe that for most people the bigger factor is no need to tote chargers or batteries when going out.

Another thing is when combined with good standby time, long battery life means the device will be more predictable and ready to use at any given point without leaving it plugged in all the time or having to remember to plug it in regularly. This isn't as important for a "daily driver" laptop that gets regular/constant use, but for tablets and 2-in-1's that serve more auxiliary purposes it's huge.

it's not that you go 6 hours straight in front of a computer as much as the laptop can't get 2 hours of charge in the 15 minutes I'm inside getting a drink and going to the bathroom.

it's better now that everything does reasonable fast-charging, but this sets up a pretty simple inequality: T(using)/T(charging) <= rate(charging)/rate(using). In other words if I am inside for 15 minutes out of every 2 hours, I have 7 parts using to 1 part charging, so with ideal usage my charge rate needs to be 8x the use rate. if you have an 85W charge rate, that means your average power consumption needs to be under 85/8 = ~10.625W average system power. with the screen and everything included. And in practice an 85W charger does not charge at 85W into the battery - not just system power, but the delivery isn't 100% efficient to begin with (look at your charge rate in system report or with aldente/coconutbattery!), you might get 70W out of that 85W connection to begin with, and 60W goes into the battery after running the laptop.

of course in practice you can accept a little attrition over time, you just need enough excess capacity to last you the day even if it's depleted at the end, but x86 laptops aren't idling at sub-10W with max screen brightness (probably no 1000 nits screen either). that number might be 25W average system power (not just processor!) or more for x86. when you're running an IDE and the screen is all the way up you probably are pulling closer to 17-18 watts even on apple silicon (the "stats" utility is great for showing this, use combined modules on the menu bar). you pretty clearly are going to burn through a large chunk of that battery even with frequent top-ups.

the better argument is "why don't you just pull over an extension cord" but that's the point, it's a quality-of-life change in the amount of charging you need to do and the degree to which you are tethered to the cord. Being able to go outside and run max screen brightness in mid-day while the dogs play in the yard, while running moderate workloads, and basically get like 6-8 hours of actual working usage plus any additional charge I can cram in while I'm inside for a break.

Traveling, traversing meeting rooms. Going on site. There are lots of reasons battery life is important in the corporate world without being present in front of your computer for more than six hours consistently.

Yes and No. You're right that battery life can be way more important for someone constantly running from meeting to meeting, or from site to site.

Then the corporate world has a solution for that for as long as computer existed: there's charging cables in basically every meeting room, every guest desk etc. In the olden days people would also keep around secundary, tertiary batteries to make the day. This would translate to a mobile battery in this days and age.

It's always nicer to not have to rely too heavily on these, but if your job is to be on the go all day long, you can't solely rely on your device battery either way.

I suspect that, if Apple products were able to float in mid-air, people would complain that other products can't float in mid-air.

Yeah, it's an engineering triumph and nice to have, but how important is it really?

It's an excelent point, that Apple used to understand better than most other computer companies: technology for technology isn't worth much, the user needs to be at the center of it.

That's why people moved to macs even as they didn't have the faster processors or better hardware. Specs were only numbers, and macs had attractive user features.

Now we're on the other side, where keynotes heavily rely on performance and technical prowess, and yes I'd totally see them come up with a mid-air floating iPad with absolutely no story behind it, the same way we have an m4 iPad Pro with no software to match it.

And if you have a framework you know you're going to be able to replace by the time it becomes unusable. They already have a more energy-dense version of the original battery. Who knows what the future batteries are going to be like ? I suppose it will only get better.

this problem isn't entirely windows-related/driver-related either. even with the very last-gen 2020 macbooks with ice lake, they still have a pretty significant amount of discharge while sleeping. and apple is running their own OS tuned to the exact hardware with the ability to get whatever source they want for drivers (and again, the will to perfection to use it).

i would have to measure it but it probably is at least 15-20% a month which is moderately crazy compared to apple silicon. i've picked up a MBA and it instantly woke up and it had lost like 2% in the month or two since I replaced it.

So glad to see minis on here so I hopefully can find a receptive audience to my rant:

None of these super cheap Chinese devices come with bios or firmware support or updates.

Minisforum, topton, qotom, beelink etc all have like maybe 1 or 2 bios updates AND EVEN THAT MANY IS RARE!

In the post spectre age, just look at amd security bulletins! Every few months there’s major bios/firmware/cpu vulnerabilities

And all the tech bloggers happily continue to showcase these devices (ltt, level1techs, sth) without any mention of the bios.

People recommend them as firewalls!

I'm a bit confused? Most security issues can be solved with microcode updates, kernel-level mitigations, or compilation level mitigations? I'm not exactly sure why this is as big of an issue as you make it sound? Realistically, anyone who cares about security should turn off SMT, which fixes speculative vulnerabilities (which is most of the serious ones). Additionally, a lot of the headlining vulnerabilities these days seem to require physical access of some kind, more relevant for portable devices.

Edit: the best solution of course would be to have Coreboot.

Most != all

Os level microcode updates only address a portion of these vulns, same for disabling smt. One unpatched vulnerability is too many let alone numerous. Not all require physical access either

Firmwares shouldn't need that many updates in the first place. Frequency of updates should be taken as inverse of its code quality.

Sadly there are too many low quality firmwares and even more below and below the floor, but that should be the theory.

Yea but most proper are subject to the duopoly of intel/amd. And appearantly their “firmware” sucks!

Spectre was a load of horseshit and probably all of the subsequent "vulnerabilities". Deliberately make your cpu slower because some people don't trust the code running on their computer. Why do you run it if you don't trust it?

A spicy take, but there's some truth to it. This class of vulnerability is way more important for PAAS providers that run workloads from multiple untrusted sources on the same hardware.

Running with mitigations=off on a single user workstation ain't the end of the world, assuming you actually trust the code you're running (and if you don't trust it... why are you running it to begin with?).

Desktop OS design still assumes that programs can access user data on disk anyway, after all.

(This isn't an excuse to throw buggy / broken firmware into the world and not support it, which is also something these no-name vendors are happy to do)

Don't they use off-the-shelf parts? Can't I just use the update of the manufacturer?

Had my eye on this. Looks like such an amazing, compact, powerful system. Minisforum has been doing an amazing job with small PC systems & this is a very compelling new form factor for them to be going into. Awesome seeing such an excellent Ryzen made so mobile, on a great screen.

I'd love to see what folks can do with power tuning on it. For good or for bad there's quite the rabbit hole of options. It'd be excellent to see a write-up from a pro on undervolting & tuning the performance profiles. Seeing what kind fo gains are possible.

There's efforts like Tuned (which is replacing the abysmally limited power-profiles-daemon in Fedora https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-41-Goes-Tuned-PPD) which can get far. But there's so many different options! And it just doesn't feel like we have good shared working knowledge on what people do and especially on what the net results are.

I wouldn’t recommend it. Minisforum has non existent bios updates/support. Go take a look at amd security bulletin. They have cpu vulns monthly! And these cheap manufacturers don’t give any bios updates

My Minisforum V3 arrived a few days ago. I like the overall package, but there are a few things I would like to add, after using it for the past few days (running NixOS with Plasma 6):

- The screen panel QC seems very inconsistent. My unit got at least 2 dead pixels and over 6 bright pixels and a horizontal faint line across the screen, possibly caused by coating. I don't notice the dead pixels that much during the normal use due to the screen PPI being quite high (215 PPI), but it has way too many. (I'm trying to arrange a replacement with Minisforum, and JP store seems to have better support than the rest, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.)

- The overall pen experience is quite good for writing. There's no perceivable lag in Krita as far as I can tell. I would still prefer Wacom Cintiq or iPad Pro for any serious drawing/painting session (the V3 pen pressure detection doesn't feel accurate enough to me).

- Everything mostly working out of the box as of kernel 6.6 (LTS). Sleep works great. The only thing that seems broken so far is the audio, which lacks any volume control. A lot of people suggest setting pipewire to use soft-mixer, but this caused the device to be muted during the machine startup. My workaround to this is to have a soft mixer Virtual Sink in pipewire and leave the audio device as-is.

- Tablet experience is suboptional. As mentioned in the article, if you happen to use more than one language, and have to use Fcitx5 for text input, then you're likely going to manually have to switch between Maliit and Fcitx5 every time you detach a keyboard (because Plasma only allow one Virtual Keyboard to be used).

- Also, Maliit lacks Ctrl/Alt/Cursor Keys, making this very unsuitable for an emergency console during travel/transit unless you also pack a keyboard, which adds thickness/weight. At this point, ThinkPad may have been a better choice. (I'm looking into possibly adding at least arrow keys to Maliit). (Also, Maliit Japanese keyboard uses a flick layout, which is broken because Maliit also uses a downward-drag gesture to dismiss itself... so you can't type any letters that require a downward flick)

- Battery life is, as mentioned in the article, 6 hours if I use powersave with power EPP, and around 4 hours if I use powersave with balance_performance EPP. Under Linux, battery drain during sleep is only around 1-2% over 8 hours (tested by charging to full before bed and leaving it unplug).

- The touchpad experience is fine. They're not amazing, but good enough to get the job done (there are certain angles that the touchpad sensor will stop registering touch events).

I am very intrigued by this tablet, did you ever try to dual boot Android X86 along side linux? 3years ago I could play wonderfully some nice games with HW support and take advantage of the Android ecosystem. Can you update us with a review if you can?

I have not, partly because the most recent build I've found is still Android 9.0, which uses kernel 4.x, while the Radeon 780M in Minisforum V3 requires at least kernel 6.4.

I have tried Waydroid, but the lack of full USB passthrough means I cannot login to my Google Account (due to Advanced Protection; and U2F doesn't work over HID forwarding) so I didn't test it further.

> I have not, partly because the most recent build I've found is still Android 9.0, which uses kernel 4.x, while the Radeon 780M in Minisforum V3 requires at least kernel 6.4.

Ah it's a shame the Android-X86 project seems to have entered the abandon-ware territory. But you can look into another OSS project, BlissOS (their latest release bases on A13, still kernel 6.1.x), should be fine but not everything would work seemlessly I assume.

Looks like there’s a new build with the 6.6 kernel. I’ll try this over the weekend and report back!

Edit: I just did a quick test, it seems to work pretty well. The volume control works, the camera works. So far, what doesn't seem to work is the fingerprint sensor and automatic orientation. The pen also seems to work.

I really appreciate the update! This is great and promising news. Will keep it on my radar :)

It's too bad that the portable display mode doesn't support touch. That was what stopped me from getting one.

Little odd too, since the keyboard is supported.

> I’ve experimented with Asahi Linux on my iMac, and while it offers a generally great experience, the ARM Linux ecosystem, especially with 16K pages, doesn’t quite meet my daily needs.

I would be interested in hearing more - I was given to believe that most open source software was fine on any of the major architectures[0], and I've not heard of the 16k thing at all (is Asahi doing something nonstandard with memory pages?)

[0] Albeit with POWER somewhat weaker and SPARC mostly lost. But I thought ARM was in good shape, and MIPS has been weirdly resilient.

The IOMMU on Apple Silicon only supports 16K pages. The page allocator on Linux only supports unified page sizes. Ergo, to make both IOMMU mappings and userland software work, everything needs to have 16K pages (on OSX, this isn't an issue, because XNU supports mapping both 4k and 16k pages).

It's not really non-standard so much as it is new-standard or different-standard. Aarch64 officially supports 4K, 16K, and 64K pages. This flexibility in the aarch64 ABI means that most compilers already produce 64K aligned load segments for aarch64, so it's not a huge deal except for software that works at a low level and makes assumptions about mmap (for example).

The main software that's truly affected beyond just needing recompilation or tweaks is x86/x86-64 emulation software, since x86 is pretty tightly coupled to 4k pages.

The tablet looks absolutely amazing! But: does it support multi touch and palm recognition? Can it be purchased with international keyboard variants? Or is it just a prototype at this point.

> Can it be purchased with international keyboard variants?

As far as I can tell on mobile, the eu store has choice between German and English (UK?) keyboards. I don't see us as an option there however - which I would prefer if Norwegian isn't an option.

It has multi-touch, but I don't think it has any special hardware for palm rejection.

They don't even mention that it's made by a Chinese company.

Granted it's not exactly Lenovo, but do you make these same comments on the new thinkpads?

They never do, because it's a massive red flag. Pun nonwithstanding.

By default most computer technology is assumed to be manufactured in Asia, if anything needs to be mentioned that is if it's made in a western country.

I was planning to buy this + nuphy keyboard for portable workstation. Maybe +egpu for home usage.

I've done this with an HP tablet for about three years ( https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/comments/s6k1qr... ).

It works mostly fine, the nuphy keyboard has been a bit glitchy in humid environments and the battery doesn't hold a charge well but it manages. Having a keyboard+trackpad that does both wired and wireless is helpful when batteries run low and in dual boot scenarios.

"Until recently, if I wish to do some programming in a coffee shop or during a family trip, my only options are the corporate-provisioned MacBook or my iPad Pro 2020, neither of which is ideal." - why not buy a Macbook Air? It's more or less the same price and form factor as the iPad but has a keyboard. You can get a Macbook Air M1 for around 800 USD now.

Touch screen and pen support seem to be very important to the author, based on the article. Taking company device for personal use is also apparently a no-no.

My Lenovo Carbon X1 has a touch screen option and is quite awesome. The Dell XPS serie also offers touchscreen options.

Overall it feels like the author is not much aware of the higher range in the non Apple laptop class beside Surface.

Not a big problem per se, but article like that are always following a journey / story so it sort of should be mentioned.

Looking forward to Linux touch-enabled Dell XPS Arm 2-in-1 based on Qualcomm Oryon.

The author is complaining about the 2K of the minisforum being on the lower end. Most lenovo tablets/convertibles still ship with 1080p or worse screen except for the >3k$ variants.

Lenovo is, for some reason, a friggin joke when it comes to screen resolution and quality. Their consumer laptops tend to have better resolutions on-paper than their pro lines. Good luck finding anything better than 1080p on 12 inches...

I am perfectly aware of the non-Apple tablet market and I also think Surface is literally the best there is, as crappy MS is. Because no one else is even trying. The screen, aspect ratio, writing feel, builtin kickstand, ...

Does Apple have exclusive deals, investments or IP licensing with tablet display vendors? Apple is also the only vendor with 4:3 aspect ratio tablet displays.

The 4:3 thing as you say. I've been wanting a tablet just for displaying sheet music. I asked some forum once but was told pretty much the same, only Apple. Why?

Android manufacturers not understanding market.

When your largest competitor for 10+ years has 4:3 screens, why not copy?

People got sued last time they copied apple's rectangle

4:3 screens preceded Apple iPad by many years, e.g. IBM Thinkpads.

Probably all three + economies of scale. Display panels are something like $15/unit, and initial fees for a panel with non-standard resolution can be in low millions. I think you'll also be asked to purchase all productions of that panel unless there are other market demands for it. Most tablets don't even sell like Surfaces on rainy days, and it's hard to justify those fees and conditions.

Not the Author, but I am currently also looking at a new 2-in-1 for myself. And by far the biggest Factor pushing me to a minisforum v3 is the Price.

I am currently looking at a old 3rd gen lenovo x13 yoga or the Minisforum

While I personally would love the new Qualcomm Surface Pro, It's just not worth the price.

I have my org's macbook pro, a personal macbook air, and a tablet. I wish the later two could simply be merged. I like how performant and silent the MBA is but there are lots of situation where simply using a tablet is more comfortable, and carrying all three devices is simply not feasible.

The Surface has always been in my eyes but from what I've seen the linux support is not as trivial with newer models.

If what you want is a good 2 in 1 I personally heard only good things about the Lenovo Yoga that my SO is using.

I have one of those for work. It's pretty amazing, but I have to run Windows on it. My IdeaPad, though, runs Fedora for three years now, and I am typing this on it: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2021/08/26/1400

I daily openSUSE Tumbleweed on a Thinkpad X1 Yoga, and while I don't use the 2-in-1 functionality a lot, I've found it to be a solid experience.

> a personal macbook air, and a tablet. I wish the latest two could simply be merged

Un-crippling of Apple Silicon iPads with Magic Keyboards, which have a superset of MacBook Air features, can happen via:

  - Competition from Linux on Qualcomm Oryon tablets and 2-in-1
  - New Apple leadership
  - EU regulation to unlock dual-boot of other operating systems, like Linux/BSD
  - Future jailbreak

That's also my wish. The Asahi project somehow gives me a bit of hope but I remember the authors saying that porting it to an iPad is simply not possible because of some booting mechanisms, and dev'in on a jailbroken device was not its preference, which is understandable.

Those who saved blobs for iOS 16.3.1 can run VMs on their jailbroken Apple Silicon iPad.

https://x.com/utmapp/status/1708907045314035986

  Apple removed Hypervisor support from XNU in iOS 16.4. Here is a diff of iOS 16.3.1 and iOS 16.4. What this means is that even if a jailbreak/TrollStore comes out for iOS 16.6.1/17.0, there will not be UTM virtualization support, even on M1/M2 iPads.

MacOS app to save blobs: https://github.com/airsquared/blobsaver

An iPad as is has never really appealed, but if I could run macOS in a VM - or something to that effect - I would be very tempted.

Sadly it doesn’t seem that Apple are really interested in offering that.

I have used various Surface devices as well - and whilst they are fine with the keyboard attached, I’ve never loved the touch experience on Windows.

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