LINUX Review Eurocom Panther 5SE Part ONE

Eurocom Panther 5SE - Manufacturer CLEVO P570WM

Configuration Detail:

Display: Chimei Innolux N173HGE-L11 (Matte)
CPU: XEON E5-2630
GPU: ATI 7970M (1)
HDD: 750 GB Seagate ST9750420AS(SSD hybrid/7200)
MEM: 16GB DDR3-1600 PC-12800; 204pin - 2 SODIMMs

Introduction

This review will focus on LINUX compatibility, not so much benchmarks, and will be for the computer science/engineers/IT guy crowd. Although in the second review there will be benchmarks in these areas: Virtualization, PostGRES. gcc, Disk. I do not at this time plan to do Video benchmarks.

Eurocom

I picked Eurocom because of the good results I got from using LINUX on their SCORPIUS model. Very nice in fact, and I use that machine has my primary workstation for doing day to day work as it has excellent LINUX compatibility. So far I have not had any issues with using the SCORPIUS as my day to day machine for several months now..

I am a contractor. I never know what I am going to be doing on a day to day basis. But, I do a lot of work for AT&T contractors supporting virtualized office tools/offices. So when I needed a portable server for office setup and tear down, I thought I would give Eurocom a try. So can the Panther 5SE really do a good job as a portable server?

Lets find out!

I ordered the Panther 5SE from Nick Pavia and it arrived 2 weeks ago. At least the first one did. Unfortunately, the first Panther 5SE I received from EUROCOM did not survive my vetting tests on its hardware. Specifically there seemed to be spurious interrupts under high load, and frequent kernel panics with no clear indication why, including a memtest which failed and a dd clone test of the drive which failed, eating itself.

Load testing is done using a virtualized lab of my own design using QEMU/KVM, which is required to run for 72 hours on the target hardware. The lab is composed of 3 Windows 2008 Server, a Windows Desktop, BSD Desktop, KDE Desktop, Oracle Server on LINUX and Solaris and several LINUX servers LDAP/BIND, AMANDA, Sendmail/POP, CUPS and of course SAMBA and NFS. Most of these servers are attached to a virtualized iSCSI pool. If the poor thing can survive all of that ruckus for 3 days, they get the coveted GOLD star approval from me personally.

However, I shipped the unit back and finally did get one that did pass my hardware tests, so I decided to keep it.

Fedora 19 LINUX Compatibility

I use Fedora LINUX because I am always doing kernel development work personally, Android work or Virtualization and need the feature set as soon as I can get it if any improvements are made in these areas. The Panther 5SE I ordered was something I wanted to setup for a 10 person office, which had the following virtualization set:

1) 10 Windows XP workstations
2) 1 SAMBA Server
3) 1 BIND Server
4) 1 LDAP/Open VPN server
5) 1 BGP router
6) 1 NFS Server (Diskless workstation support)
7) 1 CUPS/Fax/Printing Service

I did have to add an additional hardware to this configuration which included an additional 16GB of memory, and a 512GB Vertex 4 SSD drive.

The individuals connect to a 1GB switch using Fedora 19 KDE desktops, which are diskless boot from the Panther 5SE. Once powered up users then RDP into the Windows workstations using rdesktop. From there they run AutoCAD 2008/AT&T Custom apps/Microsoft Office from the Windows Virtual Machines on the Panther 5SE.

Virtualization is done with QEMU/KVM which Fedora 19 comes with out of the box. I created a bunch of BASH scripts written with virsh clone/move and migrate automatically over AT&T's network and my own to either replace virtual machines or create new ones as needed.

So far, the machine is performing nicely, and for its size I am very happy with it till the big rack machines come in later on this month to expand the office to about 100 people. At that time VM's will be automatically migrated off the Panther 5SE on the the HP G8's. After I finished configuring the box, users have reported fast desktops, and smooth AutoCAD sessions, which was my largest concern over RDP. But wth a proper kernel build latency is very low and screen updates are very fast.

So that is a bit about the application area.

Panther Hardware Issues with LINUX

Installing Fedora 19

I did not have any issues installing the alpha, beta or the release of Fedora 19 onto the Panther 5SE. Now, normally when I install Fedora I pick the KDE desktop as a preference. So when you startup KDE, for the first time you normally get a nice chord of sound playing when the desktop finishes loading. I instead was greeted with a frozen desktop.

In fact the machine crashed. So after a bit of work, I noticed that the sound was in fact causing the crash. I found that odd, as the same sound chip that is in the SCORPIUS which has no problems, is the same one the Panther 5SE uses.

So, it was time to start hacking, specifically I wanted to know what the registers look like and what the calling stack trace was JUST before it crashes. Since any attempt to use sound, caused an instant hard lockup this was not entirely straightforward.

So I went to the www.kernel.org site and pulled down a copy of the kernel tree linux-3.10.2 and built a test kernel with kdmgb, and did a ethernet debug session. I quickly isolated the call stack and dumped it. I then did the same by inserting a panic() call in the exact same place I put the break point sessions with the Panther and found what looks like to be a chip select/firmware problem with the sound driver for the Realtek ALC892.

I posted the problem along with the stack trace at bugzilla.redhat.com.

For now, however, I haven't come up with a solution to fix it. I attempted to turn off the sound in the BIOS, which is incredibly sparse as far as options go which surprised me given that the machine has a workstation class chipset: X79. I could not turn off the sound in the BIOS so I resorted to black listing the chipset at startup so that it could not be called:

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-AC892.conf:

blacklist snd_hda_intel

It is sort of unsettling to have a piece of hardware that is able to crash the server attached to it and you cannot disable the sound at the BIOS level.

So, I am not too happy about the BIOS I got with the machine given EUROCOM is selling it as a portable server.

Due to the fact that the Panther is a pretty new machine by LINUX standards, I suspect it will be fixed soon. (Perhaps by the time Kernel 3.11 hits the streets.) Otherwise, I could build a kernel with no sound support too, that would work even better. I might do that later. It is a testament to LINUX and its flexibility we are even talking about these sorts of solutions because in the proprietary world with no source code, you do not have these choices.

The other problem, which I have not had a chance to look at yet, is the USB support. USB support is not very good. It certainly looks like a chipset driver problem, and when I am more certain as to exactly why this is the case I will file a bug report. But I have noticed in some instances that the USB hub will start to loop on the console with -110 messages.

This only happens on the USB 2.0 hub on the machine if you plug in a device, and not the USB 3.0 hub. So far, in that respect USB 3.0 support seems to be working OK and I have tried wireless keyboards and mice including the unified receivers from LOGITECH. All of them work fine.

The other problem I found with the machine is the panel. It has this annoying tendancy to go ALL WHITE during ACPI idle. So when you walk into the server room, instead of a black screen, the screen is ALL WHITE and looks like a search light in the closet I have the Panther 5SE.

So to fix this I just turn off the display:

echo "0" > /sys/class/backlight/openframe-bl/bl_power

This turns the panel off and the panel goes black.If you want the panel turned back on, simply issue:

echo "1" > /sys/class/backlight/openframe-bl/bl_power

I use something called freenx-server to do admin on just about all of my servers, so when or if I should need the panel turned back on, I can always login and issue the above command. When the Panther 5SE does go into ACPI idle, the all white screen was also an opportunity to look for any dead pixels, and I did not see any, so the panel was shipped was very high quality.

When I was tinkering around trying to get the mouse to work., sometimes the LOGITECH driver has a problem pairing. Sometimes for whatever reason you need a local X Windows on the server, for example setting up Windows servers for example with virt-manager, this can be a pain.

The logitech driver for X is great, when it works. But the developers are slow to support new hardware like the Panther 5SE's USB/HUB and chipset requirements. So if you use logitech unified receiver HID input compatible devices like I do, this is a great little gem to have when pairing fails:

git clone https://git.lekensteyn.nl/ltunify.git

This program will allow you to set pairing for your wireless mouse and keyboard for LOGITECH's unified receiver.

It works, when the problem is really a pairing problem. However, on USB chipsets which are not implemented in hardware/bios correctly it does nothing to fix the problem.

However, I am glad to report the pairing worked fine on the Panther 5SE and both of my favorite keyboard and mouse combo worked fine:

Amazon.com: Logitech Wireless Keyboard K360 - Glossy Black (920-004088): Computers & Accessories
Amazon.com: Logitech Wireless Anywhere Mouse MX for PC and Mac (910-003040): Computers & Accessories

ESATA

I had no problems with eSATA support, which I used an external 4TB drive to do backups with using AMANDA, and it was very fast.

I am sort of a fan of these which worked really well with the Panther as a portable server:

Amazon.com : Thermaltake ST0021U Black 3.5 Steel Mesh & Ruggedized Plastic USB2.0 & eSATA Max 5 External Enclosure : Electronics

Active external cooling for some of my hotter 7200/10000 RPM drives keeps things cool, worked fine with the Panther 5SE.

ExpressCARD slot

I did not try all of my Express CARDS in the slot, but I did try a Belkin Express 1Gig ethernet and I had problems. The hot plug software for PCI Xpress didn't work about 30% of the time. However, when it did work it worked fine.

But, given what the hotplug module does, and how it does it, I would not propose using the Xpress CARD slot for anything until better support arrives, probably with Linux Kernel 3.11.

Conclusion PART ONE

I hope you found this first part of my use/implementation and review of the Panther 5SE informative. I will be posting a Part 2, which will deal with benchmarks, and related performance and updates on the current issues at a future date.

If you have any questions, or are not sure if your IT department should buy such a machine as a portable server, post and I will try and respond to your questions.

But I have no problems recommending the hardware for IT work in the portable server category and EUROCOM support of the Panther 5SE is very good when I did have problems, I was able to get a replacement in 4 days.

-Hackus

 

Hi, I was hoping for some tips here. I got on Friday my Panther 5SE with Xeon processors. I was under the impression they were supporting RHEL 6.4 and up … I tried to install with no success RHEL6.4 on the machine, unless I first boot with the kernel nolapic parameter … actually in that case everything works perfectly, except that I got only a single processor …. I bought this machine precisely because it can do 20 threads. I followed your suggestion and tried Fedora 19, but even as it was testing the media, the machine crashed, and again using nolapic option to the kernel, everything works fine, I can even do a complete install without any problems, but if I try to boot it in normal mode it crashes at random times. Doing a full memtest test, so far (25 minutes) working fine.

Did you experience the same problem? Or maybe I just got a bad machine, need to ask them to send me a new one?
Really appreciate your comments and help. I was able to get dmesg, cpuinfo, lspci output if you think that might help. Thanks so much!

 

Hi,

I also have a Panther 5SE I'm trying to get to work with RHEL6.6. I cannot get the built-in 1G ethernet to work without all kinds of spurious interrupts unless I put a "noacpi" parameter on the kernel argument line. When I do that, I lose hyperthreading and the touchpad functionality. Does anyone know about a bios update?