e1000e performance 30%+ slower on laptop Ubuntu vs Windows/Debian

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

nate wrote:
>Little Girl wrote:

>> That's odd. Is that something that's commonly done? I've never
>> heard of putting a driver into a kernel.  

>I think it's considered a best practice, so that the drivers are
>developed inside the kernel along with the rest instead of being
>a separate component.

I'm just kind of surprised that the Ubuntu team would be willing to
take on the work of upgrading and/or developing the driver when that
was handled by Intel before.

>The downside is that if you happen to need a newer driver it makes
>it more difficult to get unless you are willing to adopt the kernel
>it is distributed with.

True. There's something to be said for installing it yourself and
incorporating it into the kernel manually (which is something we used
to do with our NVIDIA drivers). Then you're in control.

>I had a similar issue when I first got this laptop. I used it for a
>year without ever using the Intel wireless card on it. I went on a
>big 3 month trip and realized wireless was not working. I went to
>download the driver to see that it required a new major kernel
>revision to use(would not compile on the version I had).
>Fortunately there weren't too many issues upgrading to the new major
>version but it was something I was not expecting having used Linux
>for 25 years now.

Well, I'm glad it ended up working out.

>Since my earliest days of Linux have always really disliked the
>lack of a compatible binary driver interface to the kernel which
>would make drivers/modules much more compatible across kernel
>versions. I understand the reasons why the kernel team doesn't want
>to do this and have long given up hope that it will ever happen,
>but it would make user's life a lot easier (also help Android out
>a lot as well as that is a huge sticking point in distributing
>updates to Android devices). But it is what it is.

This is out of my league. I've never heard of such a thing

>It's possible Intel will continue releasing standalone drivers on
>their website going forward as new versions come out, though am not
>optimistic they will.

Yeah, it sounds like they won't - at least for that one.

>> That's good, though, right?  

>Yes it just means the latest driver is in the kernel already so
>that is generally good. Unless you have an edge case where the
>newer driver breaks something but that is probably quite rare.

Then it would seem that there would be a pit to fall into no matter
which way you turn.

>> I'm sorry. I know how frustrating that can be. Hopefully someone
>> else will chime in here and offer something better.  

>No problem, not optimistic to find a solution at this point,

That's a shame, but maybe something good will still happen.

>I have another somewhat unique case of a massive memory leak in
>Ubuntu 20 kernels vs Ubuntu 16 kernels(have 6 servers with 3 kernels
>and the same workload running the trend is super clear) which I
>reported on this list earlier in the year with no replies.

That's also a shame. Have you tried posting that on the
ubuntu-servers mailing list? They might know more about it.

> Went back and am gathering more info there, but not optimistic to
> find a real solution(workaround is to reboot as the kernel is not
> freeing the memory) in that case either.

Oh, you definitely need a better workaround or solution than that. I
hope the server folks will have an answer for you.

I'm joining you in a bit of computer turbulence since I'm about to
do a major operating system upgrade and switch to a different desktop
at the same time, which will cause the loss of several pieces of
software that I love and, thus, be quite challenging. Here's hoping
that things smooth out for both of us sooner rather than later.

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.