Are there Linux folks out there? Seek advise on tools for benchmarking and mon-1

[metadist]

Greetings all,

I run Linux on my recently built PC (8700K+Asus Prime z370-a, Alphacool Eisbaer LT240 AiO cooler, Super flower Ledex II 750W), and I find it a bit hard to get the info about tools and tricks regarding OC. Here is something I have found and used so far, and then I seek some advise.

1. Benchmarking tools

a. prime95.
I used three version of it:
- the most recent one,
- 26.6 (that is supposed to be avx-free, but I see does have some opscodes from avx set,
- and 25.11, that is really AVX free

I wanted to to use the last one as a stress test on the max freq, but I observe that it uses 5 out of 5 cores initially, and then regresses to just 4 cores.

b. Intel Linkpack benchmark
This puts the heaviest load on the CPU, much heavier than prime95. But since this is matrix multiplication load type, I can't dismiss its results for my OC results, since I do want to perform such kind of calculation on my PC ( I am data scientist)

c. I have written some of my own tests on Python using Numpy and sckit-learn packages, as well as LightGBM - since this is a kind of load I'll be putting my PC under on a daily basis. I observe that, in particular, LightGBM can induce long avx-free load on all cores and run on the max turbo-frequency.

2. Monitoring tools

- i7z can print some stats on cores, like freq and temperatures, and some more,
- turbostat can do the same
- pcm (pcm.x) I ended up using this one, got it from Github, since I found it somewhat more convinient to run with benchmarks, even though it has some pecularities, i.e. it reports freq as a multiplier to the base 3.7 one (i.e. will report 1.34 for 5GH), and report temperature as 100-t

3. Tricks

To run monitoring, I have to do this on my unbuntu 18.04

echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog
modprobe msr



4. My problems

I wanted to get rid of Linux tools to manage power, thus completely relying on bios settings (to begin with)
I have turned off thermald, and got rid of acpi_pm kernel module with grub option thermal.off=1
I don't think. how ever this helps, as I still see that intel_pstate driver governs power. My understanding that If I disable it, that some thing else will take its place, i.e. cpufreq. Then, I don't see howto effectively manage intel_pstate, i.e. how it works in real time and how to set its preferences.

So far I see that the system starts to throttle very aggressively on load, i.e. under a OC profile (settings from @de8bauer or @The Sentinel videos) would go under 3Ghz with time, even w/o reaching 80 degrees. I don't really understand if this is due to BIOS scaling or Linux thermal manaegement)

I also can't figure out to to display vcore

Finally, how to run mprime in benchmark mode, i.e get some numbers for prformance evaluation? So far I was only running ./mprime -t for torture tests

Thanks in advance, all Linux enthusiasts!