Message for Proxmox GURUS. Is VE capable of running on 12th Generation Intel (Alder Lake CPUs)

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titust11

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Nov 18, 2021
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I kindly asked a question previously to the community. Have any of you tried to run the VE on a 12th gen Intel machine? Unfortunately I didn't have answers.

These new CPUs are hybrid, with P-Cores and E-Cores. If Intel is going in this direction, then all future CPUs will have the similar characteristics.
Apparently the future Intel Enterprise CPUs (Xeon) will use the LGA1800 socket which will almost identical to the LGA1700 of the Alder Lake.
So I guess at one point Proxmox will have to follow the trend with the new generation CPUs, right?

I am addressing this question to the Proxmox gurus, are you so kind to elaborate on this topic?
Can we install right now VE on a 12th gen motherboard? If not maybe in the future? Is anyone looking into this? Please help
 
titust11 said:
I kindly asked a question previously to the community. Have any of you tried to run the VE on a 12th gen Intel machine? Unfortunately I didn't have answers.

These new CPUs are hybrid, with P-Cores and E-Cores. If Intel is going in this direction, then all future CPUs will have the similar characteristics.
Apparently the future Intel Enterprise CPUs (Xeon) will use the LGA1800 socket which will almost identical to the LGA1700 of the Alder Lake.
So I guess at one point Proxmox will have to follow the trend with the new generation CPUs, right?

I am addressing this question to the Proxmox gurus, are you so kind to elaborate on this topic?
Can we install right now VE on a 12th gen motherboard? If not maybe in the future? Is anyone looking into this? Please help
Click to expand...

Current Intel Scalable Processors use 4189 pins. The trend has been to continually increase connections. 1366-> 2011-> 3647-> 4189. Unless Intel completely upends their march toward bigger, higher wattage processors there is no chance LGA 1800 will be for Scalable Xeons.

Proxmox is built on Debian Bullseye and the Ubuntu kernel. Hardware support generally has nothing to do with PVE and is all determined upstream.
 
jasonsansone said:
Current Intel Scalable Processors use 4189 pins. The trend has been to continually increase connections. 1366-> 2011-> 3647-> 4189. Unless Intel completely upends their march toward bigger, higher wattage processors there is no chance LGA 1800 will be for Scalable Xeons.

Proxmox is built on Debian Bullseye and the Ubuntu kernel. Hardware support generally has nothing to do with PVE and is all determined upstream.
Click to expand...
This means that, if Debian and Ubuntu work fine on Alder Lake, then Proxmox will work too….right?
 
@titust11 so I had 2 PCs arrive the other day. Both intel i9 12900k alter lakes.
While what others are saying around "if it works upstream it'll work in proxmox" is true. It's worth highlighting, that from everything I could find, upstream has not yet got optimised support for Alder Lake in any meaningful way. Only in the recent 5.16 RCs has there been any refinement to the scheduling in terms of fixing scheduling issues (from what I can tell anyway).

When I run proxmox on these, I was regularity finding VMs getting scheduled to the "E" cores, killing performance. This is of course expected given the 5.13 kernel has no concept of the intel P/E scheduling setup yet. I'm not sure if the fixes in 5.15/6 will get back ported to the Ubuntu kernel, but my solution so far has been to disable the E cores completely in the BIOS to get the performance back to something predictable.
I'm sure there's some uses for them for less critical workloads though, so it'll be up to you to decide if you disable the E cores like we did or if you just pin the VMs you need performance on to the P cores.

I'm sure the situation will improve in time as things get backported and newer kernels adopted in Proxmox.
I'm tempted to see if I can compile a 5.16 RC and use that on Proxmox to see if the scheduling issues I observed are resolved, but that's a bit beyond my skillset right now.

Intel worked closely with Microsoft to get proper intel director support into windows 11 and Linux seems to of been an afterthought here.
 
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