Intel Coffee Lake i7-8850H UHD 630

Issues related to hardware problems
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EFinlayson
Posts: 4
Joined: 2020/11/02 11:00:45

Intel Coffee Lake i7-8850H UHD 630

Post by EFinlayson » 2020/11/02 12:18:28

Hi everyone,
Hoping for some fairly specific guidance here, so please bear with me on this.
For years I have run various older Dell servers at home as development environments, and this has worked well. However they are power hungery and expensive to run 24/7 as well as being very noisy. When it came item to renew my current I decided to have a look around and to try to get something more suited to the task, ie low power requirements and much quieter. I cam across these:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3283759 ... 4c4ddfh5Cr

Which is a micro-atx based i7 laptop powered machine which should be near silent for my needs. I subsequently bought one, and have installed 32Gb of matched DDR4 memory and 1 TB WD Blue nvme M.2 SSD. Woohoo, I here is say, should be a tidy little runner. I would indeed agree with you. her is the issue:

This computer is running the Coffee Lake i7-8850H 6 Core 12 Threads processor with integrated UHD Graphics 630 video. this lead to one small issue and one large one. This small issue is that it boots be default into 4k mode meaning none of my monitors can support it. This is not too large an issue as I am going to be running it headless anyway and can connect it ton my 4k TV for setup. The second problem is, that during product selection I confirm that Linux could run on box, in fact it clearly stated that in the advertisement (Caveat Emptor, should have checked explicitly for Centos) so when I tried to install Centos 8 from USB it just hangs at the point where the first graphic screen should be displayed. The mouse icon is present and working but otherwise just a black screen.
After some research I discovered that this chipset is also used in Dell Precision 5530 Laptops an others, and can be bought pre-configure with RHEL. Chasing the white bunny, lead me through the looking glass and into the Intel site where it is stated that RHEL and other "Linux* supported by Intel via the upstreaming of Intel Linux* drivers to the Linux* Open Source Community.".

https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/ ... rview.html

I toddle off Redhat to find a security notice which also mentions this same explicit chipset and a microcode update (yay, I think I'm getting some where now)

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/5142751

armed with this knowledge and certain that Centos is a distro which tends to lead RHEL by a small amount, I expected to find that somewhere on the Centos site a kernel driver or patch for this chipset, but alas no.

Finally, my question. Considering that support for the i7-8850H is declared by DELL, and maintained by RedHat, surely there is some way getting Centos 8 to install, I cannot even get it to start in text mode. Has anyone managed to get Centos 8 onto a i7-8850H based system such as the DELL Precision 5530 Laptop.

Thank you for your patience and thank you in advance for any assistance offered.
Fin.

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TrevorH
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Re: Intel Coffee Lake i7-8850H UHD 630

Post by TrevorH » 2020/11/02 17:46:15

armed with this knowledge and certain that Centos is a distro which tends to lead RHEL by a small amount,
No, wrong way round. CentOS is a rebuild of the sources used to build RHEL and thus lags RHEL by a small amount, sometimes a month or so like now when RHEL 7.9 came out at the end of September and CentOS 7.9 is not yet available.

Did you try the basic video option in the initial Troubleshooting menu when you boot?
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

EFinlayson
Posts: 4
Joined: 2020/11/02 11:00:45

Re: Intel Coffee Lake i7-8850H UHD 630

Post by EFinlayson » 2020/11/03 12:40:47

My Bad, I thought it was Centos before RHEL.

Hmm, that just makes things even more confusing because the kernel level drivers are for Coffee Lake UHD 630 are in RHEL, and have been for over a year, yet I cannot get Centos to install on this box, even in text mode. I have obviously remade the installation media a few times and from different ISOs from different mirrors, it always gets to the point where is should be entering the first menu (region/language selection from memory) and simply hangs on a black screen with the mouse pointer showing. I've been using Centos as my server OS of choice for over 10 years now and will regret losing it if I now have to move over to Ubuntu just because it supports the chipset I'm using. I tested that it's not the hardware fault by successfully installing windows 10 on the tin which works perfectly passing various test in the meantime, but this is meant as a home dev server so I cannot have windows on it.
Sorry that I wasn't clear about this before, but yes i have tried a "minimal graphics" install from the troubleshooting submenu, and it behaved exactly the same.

One thing I haven't tried is installing Centos 7.8, which I will try tonight.
I will of course report back with my findings.

EFinlayson
Posts: 4
Joined: 2020/11/02 11:00:45

Re: Intel Coffee Lake i7-8850H UHD 630

Post by EFinlayson » 2020/11/06 17:15:03

Just a brief update on this matter. Centos 7 is failing in exactly the same. Look like I will have to resort to Ubuntu

EFinlayson
Posts: 4
Joined: 2020/11/02 11:00:45

Re: Intel Coffee Lake i7-8850H UHD 630

Post by EFinlayson » 2020/11/08 03:50:28

Does anyone know of any official Centos forums or news groups where this question might be asked. I ask because the lack of response here indicates either disinterest, inactivity or too specific a problem so I must cast me net wider now.

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KernelOops
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Re: Intel Coffee Lake i7-8850H UHD 630

Post by KernelOops » 2020/11/08 08:19:07

Due to the nature of CentOS, most people who use it are professionals, who don't tend to chat in forums (and we know what we are doing :mrgreen: ). You'll notice that 90% of posts are from one-off people who ask something and then never come back.

From a quick look around my office, I notice the following Intel cpus (the rest of them are all AMD), they all work fine with CentOS:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5930K CPU @ 3.50GHz
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6500U CPU @ 2.50GHz

My suggestion, is to try Fedora, which has a broader support for hardware and its essentially a cousin of RHEL/CentOS. You can try the various editions (Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, etc) or the various spins (Cinnamon, etc).
--
R.I.P. CentOS :cry:
--

desertcat
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Location: Tucson, AZ

Re: Intel Coffee Lake i7-8850H UHD 630

Post by desertcat » 2020/12/02 23:31:41

EFinlayson wrote:
2020/11/02 12:18:28
Hi everyone,
Hoping for some fairly specific guidance here, so please bear with me on this.
For years I have run various older Dell servers at home as development environments, and this has worked well. However they are power hungery and expensive to run 24/7 as well as being very noisy. When it came item to renew my current I decided to have a look around and to try to get something more suited to the task, ie low power requirements and much quieter. I cam across these:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3283759 ... 4c4ddfh5Cr

Which is a micro-atx based i7 laptop powered machine which should be near silent for my needs. I subsequently bought one, and have installed 32Gb of matched DDR4 memory and 1 TB WD Blue nvme M.2 SSD. Woohoo, I here is say, should be a tidy little runner. I would indeed agree with you. her is the issue:

This computer is running the Coffee Lake i7-8850H 6 Core 12 Threads processor with integrated UHD Graphics 630 video. this lead to one small issue and one large one. This small issue is that it boots be default into 4k mode meaning none of my monitors can support it. This is not too large an issue as I am going to be running it headless anyway and can connect it ton my 4k TV for setup. The second problem is, that during product selection I confirm that Linux could run on box, in fact it clearly stated that in the advertisement (Caveat Emptor, should have checked explicitly for Centos) so when I tried to install Centos 8 from USB it just hangs at the point where the first graphic screen should be displayed. The mouse icon is present and working but otherwise just a black screen.
After some research I discovered that this chipset is also used in Dell Precision 5530 Laptops an others, and can be bought pre-configure with RHEL. Chasing the white bunny, lead me through the looking glass and into the Intel site where it is stated that RHEL and other "Linux* supported by Intel via the upstreaming of Intel Linux* drivers to the Linux* Open Source Community.".

https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/ ... rview.html

I toddle off Redhat to find a security notice which also mentions this same explicit chipset and a microcode update (yay, I think I'm getting some where now)

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/5142751

armed with this knowledge and certain that Centos is a distro which tends to lead RHEL by a small amount, I expected to find that somewhere on the Centos site a kernel driver or patch for this chipset, but alas no.

Finally, my question. Considering that support for the i7-8850H is declared by DELL, and maintained by RedHat, surely there is some way getting Centos 8 to install, I cannot even get it to start in text mode. Has anyone managed to get Centos 8 onto a i7-8850H based system such as the DELL Precision 5530 Laptop.

Thank you for your patience and thank you in advance for any assistance offered.
Fin.
For years I have run various older Dell servers at home as development environments, and this has worked well. However ...

The second you uttered the word "Dell" I saw RED as well as felt deep sorrow for you. Of all the computers made I would NEVER buy one: My sister has owned nothing but Dell, and I have had to go in and fix them when her warranty ran out. Everyone I found was made with bargain basement parts made in China, and everyone was vastly under powered.

She recently bought a mini desktop which had a proprietary mobo, that had 1 16X PCIx slot for a graphics card, but was furnished with a 200W PSU -- that is not a typo: 200W PSU. A EVGA GeForce 1030 low profile Graphics card I bought her Dell said that if she installed it would "destroy her motherboard", as it required a PSU of 250 W, yet oddly they said that their Dell GeForce 730 which required a *minimum* 300 W PSU was fine.

So I set out to find an upgrade for the PSU, but unfortunately because of the proprietary mobo, it also used a proprietary PSU. It also came with a 7th Gen CPU, and expandable to 16 GB. WOW!! 16 GB!! And she paid ONLY $635 for it. What Dell really sold her was an older design computer which once ran Window XP or Possibly Windows 7, into which they updated the CPU, and came with Windows 10 Pro pre-installed. Like you she is confined to using the the CPU's onboard graphics. That said she is HAPPY with her purchase, and the only thing she does is answer email, and surf the net. Still $635 for absolute JUNK!!!

[/rant]

Buy a Dell computer?!? Not on your life. I'd buy an HP -- also not a great computer, but at least I can fix them often with off the shelf parts. Horrible computers; Horrible customer service; Horrible Tech support; plus they are constantly trying to sell you stuff that you did not request, and trying to sell you an extended warranty.

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