Alder lake on esx?

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ReturnedSword

Active Member
Jun 15, 2018
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Santa Monica, CA
It depends on which ADL. You’ll have to set cpuUniformityHardCheckPanic=FALSE set in the boot.cfg.

ESXi doesn’t work well with both P-cores and E-cores enabled the last time I checked. I have the E-cores disabled in BIOS. As long as you are only enabling one type of core you shouldn’t have any major issues.
 

jpmomo

Active Member
Aug 12, 2018
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It depends on which ADL. You’ll have to set cpuUniformityHardCheckPanic=FALSE set in the boot.cfg.

ESXi doesn’t work well with both P-cores and E-cores enabled the last time I checked. I have the E-cores disabled in BIOS. As long as you are only enabling one type of core you shouldn’t have any major issues.
Thanks for the confirmation. I was able to install esx 7.0U3 on a gigabyte z690i aorus ultra ddr4 using an intel i9-12900k. I know an i9-12900k on a mini itx mb is a bit absurd but I had to try!

I didn't put set that parameter to false in the boot.cfg as I am not sure where to do that. I am not sure if it is still needed and if I do put it to false, will it allow me to enable all of the cores? I did have to disable the e-cores so I only have 8 p-cores or 16 threads.

My main objective for this experiment was to get a system that would support pcie gen5. I have a mellanox connectx-7 on order and it is a dual port 200GE pci gen5 nic. that nic would oversubscribe a pcie gen4 x16 slot but a gen5 x16 slot should not be the limiting factor.

I still have a couple of issues with this setup. There is no way that I know of to get any of the sensor info as this board does not have ipmi. the combo of that cpu and the very sff setup is just waiting to melt down!

I am still trying to find a way in vmware esx 7.x to get the pci lnk sta and lnk cap. in linux it is found via the lspci -vv command. Not sure how to get that info in vmware. I am trying to confirm that at least the slot is recognized as pcie 5.0. I will boot up with a linux distro to check but was hoping to just find some vmware command like esxcli ..

I also needed to manually add the driver for the onboard 2.5GE nic which is not officially supported.

Mighty Mouse currently with a dual port 100G pci gen4 nic. Hopefully a dual port 200G pci gen5 soon!

1647575130429.png

1647576115635.png
 

jpmomo

Active Member
Aug 12, 2018
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some more progress. I manually added the cpuUniformityHardCheckPanic=FALSE during boot via the shift o and was able to boot with both P and E cores. Do you know how I can make that setting persistent? It seems like I need to enter that command manually each time I boot. The only advanced system setting that I saw in the UI was the following:

VMkernel.Boot.checkCPUIDLimit

That is currently set to true. I am not sure how to modify the boot.cfg after installing.



1647582200403.png

I am still trying to see if we can get 24 threads (8 of the P cores hyperthreaded plus 8 of the E cores). from vmware's perspective, it shows a cpu resource of 51 GHz with this current config. If I disable the E cores, the P cores are hyperthreaded but the cpu resources are only about 25 GHz.

1647582408771.png
 

Rand__

Well-Known Member
Mar 6, 2014
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My main objective for this experiment was to get a system that would support pcie gen5. I have a mellanox connectx-7 on order and it is a dual port 200GE pci gen5 nic. that nic would oversubscribe a pcie gen4 x16 slot but a gen5 x16 slot should not be the limiting factor.
Your experiments make me a bit jealous;)
 

zer0sum

Well-Known Member
Mar 8, 2013
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Or, you could come to the dark side and run Proxmox :D

Just fire it up and pin the VM's to the P cores or E cores however you like :p
 

jpmomo

Active Member
Aug 12, 2018
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slight road block. I can't seem to get this board to enable sriov which is a show stopper for my use case. Does anyone know of an adler lake mb that supports sriov?
 

jpmomo

Active Member
Aug 12, 2018
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another update:
I was able to make the boot.cfg change persistent by just manually editing the boot.cfg file and appending that parameter.
I was also able to set the nic into pci-pt (as opposed to sriov). Unfortunately, the performance on the dual port 100GE nic was pretty bad (compared to an ice lake cpu.) that nic was pci gen4 and only 2x100GE. I don't think this setup will work performance wise for the gen5 nic which will be 2x200GE. This may require a sapphire rapids cpu whenever they are released (or I can find one along with a mb that supports it!)
 

vijode

New Member
Sep 28, 2022
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some more progress. I manually added the cpuUniformityHardCheckPanic=FALSE during boot via the shift o and was able to boot with both P and E cores. Do you know how I can make that setting persistent? It seems like I need to enter that command manually each time I boot. The only advanced system setting that I saw in the UI was the following:

VMkernel.Boot.checkCPUIDLimit

That is currently set to true. I am not sure how to modify the boot.cfg after installing.



View attachment 22116

I am still trying to see if we can get 24 threads (8 of the P cores hyperthreaded plus 8 of the E cores). from vmware's perspective, it shows a cpu resource of 51 GHz with this current config. If I disable the E cores, the P cores are hyperthreaded but the cpu resources are only about 25 GHz.

View attachment 22117
Hi

You mentioned that you enabled both P & E cores. But as per screenshot, its showing only 16 Logic. Proces. (that means only 16 cores - P cores)
Is that right?