Intel NUC is not only for Windows. Teach Nyusha to believe in the universal bonds of community that bind all of humanity.

Today, on my lab bench, not just a computer, but a bright representative of the “upcoming standard of computing and computing,” Intel NUC D54250WYKH. "Two-story" version of the device, with the ability to install 2.5 "hard drives. Below, I will tell you how I learned that Nyusha, and not Nikifor or Nikanor, was in front of me, about how I instilled Nyusha into the philosophy of Ubuntu, as well as some personal impressions and impartial tests.

I got a copy of Intel NUC D54250WYKH packed in a colorful box of very thick and durable cardboard, covered with a thick layer of graphics and useful information about the contents.


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I open the box and, I am greeted by a brass band with a very loud and vigorous sounding official Intel ringtone. I close the box, shake my head, open it again - the music sounds again. Colleagues turn their heads in my direction.
Realizing that I am not the only one to hear it, and the matter is most likely not in me - I begin to carefully study the box, and I find a hidden photo cell that, reacting to the light, starts the “music box” neatly glued inside.




It was the first, but far from the last, which surprised me this heir of existing computers and the forerunner of the future. (at that moment I was still of the opinion that this device is masculine).

I take out and study the contents of the package.
Inside the box is:

• Intel NUC D54250WYKH;
• external power supply;
• adapter plate for mounting the device on a VESA-compatible monitor;
• a rather thick stack of colorful booklets describing the distinguishing features of this revolutionary.

Inside the box is not:

• memory and hard disk. Anticipating questions, I will say - they are not inside the device either. The Intel NUC of all modifications comes without these optional parts;
• HDMI cable - MiniHDMI (Mini-HDMI is displayed on the device);
• power cable type IEC C5 (Mickey Mouse).

After examining the contents of the package, I just had the idea that my test subject was a girl. You must admit, in a very female way, to carry several glossy magazines in the car, instead of a jack and a wheel wrench.

In a separate package, Intel provided optional, but useful spare parts:

• One strap of memory 4Gb Kingston DDR3L SODIMM. Attention! For Intel NUC, only DDR3L with power supply voltage of 1.35V is suitable.
• One SSDSC2BW120A4 drive. Attention! I will be brief - it is beautiful.

Install optional components.
Unscrew the 4 screws on the bottom of the device, remove the bottom cover:





We take out and throw away the "second floor":



Install the memory:



We insert the SSD into the basket before the characteristic click and put the basket in place:



The basket at Nyusha is made for discs up to 9.5 mm thick. My test SSD sample from Intel has a thickness of 7mm.
I did not attach any importance to this, as a result, after assembling, while gently wiggling Nyusha in her hand, she published melodious clicks from a beating metal SSD about the metal of the basket.

I disassemble and fix the SSD in the basket with two screws (screws are included in the delivery).
True, my screws were not included in my “promo” kit, so I had to additionally solve the quest “find two screws”.

View of the device from the side of connectors:



We take measurements:
The weight of the device with installed memory and SSD is 0.75Kg.
Overall dimensions (LxWxH) - 116.6 x 112 x 51.5 mm.
Power adapter (external) - 19V DC, 65 W (with a large margin, as under full load the device consumes about 35W)
other device specifications on the Intel site

Turn on the device!
The round power button on the top panel glows in a pleasant blue.
Press F2 and get into the BIOS. The appearance of the BIOS is made in a very brutal color scheme, but the girl's features are present here: the presence of mouse support, animation of appearing and disappearing windows, playing shadows on graphic elements and inscriptions, and, finally, an incredible number of settings and all sorts of ruches.




The first impression from the BIOS research is “why does this device have an operating system at all? You can wander endlessly through the back streets of this BIOS. "
For the purity of the experiment, leave the default BIOS settings.

Install from USB flash Ubuntu 14.04. 64bit.
The installation is routine, boring and very fast. At the end of the installation, Ubuntu asks you to remove the installation media and reboot the device.
I do as they ask.

Nyusha reboots and shows her girlish character, reporting “No EFI device found” . Of course, entering the BIOS and disabling the boot UEFI problem does not solve.

“I still forgot to check the OS installation time,” I justify my further actions. I leave in the BIOS boot only with Legacy devices, listen to the notation that I can no longer use drives larger than 2TB, and will lose various additional buns.
I agree with this, and run the installation again.

Installing from power on to running a good Ubuntu takes 12 minutes.
In Legacy boot mode, Nyusha does not ask any questions and works great.

Below I will describe what was the problem with loading in EFI mode, and give a prescription for treatment.

I want to note right away - in the process of a week-long communication with Intel NUC, I installed several different versions of Ubuntu and Kubuntu 32 and 64 bits on it. On all these operating systems, I drove tests from the phoronix test suite.
During the tests, the NUC was reset many times.

I can not say whether the trait of the nature of my particular instance, or the general trait of this model, but Intel NUC D54250WYKH really does not like to be "unexpectedly turned off." If you turn off the device by pressing a button, or completely barbarically - pulling the power out, even if at that moment the device was loaded from live USB and was not busy (as an example, it was waiting for my choice to install Ubuntu or run without installation) the next time the NUC was turned on shows a black square on the monitor, that is, nothing at all, while the device’s power indicator is on, and the monitor says “no signal”. The device must be turned off with the button. The next time you turn on Nyusha will whimsically inform that her BIOS (I don’t know where the BIOS is, but she’s talking about it) discovered that her work was completed incorrectly and will offer to either enter the BIOS or continue working. It seems that Nyusha is proud of his BIOS and just lures to look at it once more.

Unnoticed, the first day of acquaintance with Nyusha came to an end, I did not want to part with her. Suddenly, the thought came to combine two pleasant things, firstly, to watch the movie Noah at home on a big TV, BD-Rip, which just appeared on the Internet in FullHD (certainly, exclusively for educational purposes) and secondly, to continue acquaintance with the device .
The 21GB file was flooded over the network on the Nyushin SSD “conditionally instantly” (the gigabit network interface for the first, but not the last time, turned out to be the narrowest place in Nyusha).
After a couple of hours, Nyusha, being connected to the TV, cheerfully played through the VLC-Player video stream:

:MKV : MPEG-4 AVC, 16.6 Mbps , 1920x1040 (1.85:1), 23.976 fps, 0.347 bit/pixel 

The performance of the device for decoding such a video stream, even when using the default video driver, suffices with a margin. No frame drops or slowdowns were noticed either by eye or in VLC statistics.
The device in the process was barely warm, the cooling system was absolutely inaudible.

I want to note that I did not manage to hear the work of the cooling system even on the other days of the tests. The fan in the device is very, very quiet, but it copes with its work adequately.
Nyusha's body could not be heated above the “slightly warm” state in any test.

This is how the first version of the original use of the Intel NUC was born - it can serve as a portable media player.

Then there were weekdays.
Nyusha was installed phoronix test suite and all sorts of tests began.

This is how the phoronix test suite defines the Intel NUC D54250WYKH filling:

 Hardware: Processor: Intel Core i5-4250U @ 1.30GHz (4 Cores), Motherboard: Intel D54250WYK, Chipset: Intel Haswell-ULT DRAM, Memory: 4096MB, Disk: 120GB INTEL SSDSC2BW12, Graphics: Intel Haswell-ULT IGP (1000MHz), Audio: Intel Haswell-ULT HD Audio, Network: Intel Connection I218-V 

Nyusha as a web server:
The table shows the performance data Nyushi compared to
DELL, which used to serve as a server for a corporate web server in a small company, and with a matchbox - Cubieboard 2.
On a quite reasonable question that I compare warm to soft, I want to note - Intel NUC is also “not exactly a server”.

No	Experimental	PHP Bench	Nginx bench	Apache bench
one	Intel Core i5-4250U @ 1.30GHz (4 Cores), Memory: 1 x 4096 MB	78457 points	23686 PPS	17931 PPS
2	Intel Xeon E3-1220L @ 2.20 GHz (2 Cores), Memory: 4096MB	43758 points	12197 PPS	6113 PPS
3	ARMv7 rev 4 @ 0.91GHz (2 Cores), Motherboard: sun7i, Memory: 1024MB	8394 points	1323 PPS	817 PPS

Conclusion:
Nyusha can play the role of a small web server, or a load balancer for the “big brothers”.
When distributing statics, if the files being distributed are more than 6Kb, Nyusha’s bottleneck will again be a gigabit network.

Tests graphics subsystem.
In the graphic tests Nyusha proved to be so bad that for a long time I could not believe in the veracity of the results.
I ran tests on Ubuntu and Kubuntu 13.10 and 14.04 (just four distributions).
Here are the results:

QGears2: (Flying bench against the backdrop of the Egyptian pyramids).

 pts/qgears2-1.0.1 [XRender + Image Scaling] Average: 305.17 Frames Per Second 

Nexuiz 2.5.2: (Demo Record Defmatch. Rubilovo and the sea of ​​blood. 18+).

 pts/nexuiz-1.6.1 [1920 x 1080 w/ HDR] Average: 10.74 Frames Per Second 

Unigine Sanctuary 2.3: (very beautiful render with colored stained glass and fog).

 pts/unigine-sanctuary-1.5.2 [1920 x 1080] Average: 13.82 Frames Per Second 

Unigine Tropics 1.3: (an even more beautiful render of a trip to a fabulous island).

 pts/unigine-tropics-1.5.3 [1920 x 1080] Average: 11.16 Frames Per Second 

All tests, except the flying bench, look like a "turn-based strategy."

Being in a depressed state, I decided that it was time to put the graphics drivers from Intel. Oh, they have to fix the situation.

On the Intel Open Source Technology Center website, go to the download section for graphics drivers .
Select the appropriate driver.

under Ubuntu x64 installation looks like this:

 $ cd /tmp/ $ wget https://download.01.org/gfx/ubuntu/14.04/main/pool/main/i/intel-linux-graphics-installer/intel-linux-graphics-installer_1.0.6-0intel1_amd64.deb $ sudo dpkg -i intel-linux-graphics-installer_1.0.6-0intel1_amd64.deb $ sudo intel-linux-graphics-installer 

Next, follow the instructions of the graphical installer. At the end of the installation - reboot.

Hoping for the best, I run the test suite again.
Alas.
The miracle did not happen. Rather, it happened but not where it wanted to:
QGears2 and Nexuiz 2.5.2 accelerated 2.5 times and yielded 869 and 24 FPS, respectively, and the results of Unigine Sanctuary and Unigine Tropics did not change completely, and remained a turn-based strategy.

Conclusion:
A gaming station, running Ubuntu, Nyusha will not be, at least, until drivers are released that more fully reveal its potential.

Disk subsystem performance:

 pts/iozone-1.8.0 [Record Size: 4Kb - File: 8GB - Test: Read] - Average: 387.98 MB/s pts/iozone-1.8.0 [Record Size: 1MB - File: 8GB - Test: Read] - Average: 388.10 MB/s pts/iozone-1.8.0 [Record Size: 4Kb - File: 8GB - Test: Write] - Average: 489.53 MB/s pts/iozone-1.8.0 [Record Size: 1MB - File: 8GB - Test: Write] - Average: 490.38 MB/s 

In my opinion, the indicators are very decent, given the duration of the tests at 8 o'clock.
The only surprise is that the write speed is faster than the read speed.

When using test files of small size (2Gb), when caches are involved, the results of reading tests are absolutely fantastic:

 pts/iozone-1.8.0 [Record Size: 4Kb - File: 2GB - Test: Read] - Average: 3404.08 MB/s pts/iozone-1.8.0 [Record Size: 1MB - File: 2GB - Test: Read] - Average: 6440.35 MB/s 

The write speed remains within 490MB / s.

This test suite is not directly related to the Intel NUC, but I just could not test this silvery handsome man - SSDSC2BW120A4.

Conclusion:
Everyone will do it himself.

I almost forgot. ( up )
At the very beginning of the article, I wrote that capricious Nyusha refused to download the newly installed Ubuntu in EFI mode.
In the process of studying the structure of the / boot partition, I understood the reason and found a solution.
The fact is that Nyusha is looking for a bootloader at /EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi, and Ubuntu is putting it at / EFI / ubuntu / and also calls grubx64.efi
UPD: fixed a typo in the description of the problem. Thank you Mithgol and Ghool
Solution for the lazy:
Boot from Live USB, open the console, enter:

 $ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt $ sudo mkdir /mnt/EFI/BOOT $ sudo cp /mnt/EFI/ubuntu/* /mnt/EFI/BOOT $ sudo mv /mnt/EFI/BOOT/grubx64.efi /mnt/EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi $ sudo umount /dev/sda1 $ sudo reboot 

Summary:
Intel NUC D54250WYKH as a whole, is friends with linux, adequately gets along with the Ubuntu philosophy (belief in the universal bonds of community, connecting all of humanity), and is quite suitable for use in any server role under moderate workload.
Unfortunately, the tested sample is not removed on the 1U shelf, due to the height of 52mm.

However, Intel has an Intel NUC D54250WYK device.
The main differences are:

• there is no "H" at the end;
• there is no "second floor" inside the building;
• There is no possibility to install a 2.5 ”disk.

But:

• It is possible to install SSD mSATA in one of two mini PCI Express slots;
• device height 35.6mm.

Based on Intel NUC D54250WYK. You can build a computing cluster with a density of 12 CPUs per 1U , which is approximately equal to 500 CPUs in a standard server rack.
This stand will look fantastic.

If I had a flock of at least eight Intel NUC D54250WYKs, I would be happy to build a cluster on Ubuntu Cloud.
I suspect that being installed in a 19 '' rack, these silvery beauties will look enchanting.

On this finish.

PS In fact, during testing, I conducted many more tests from the phoronix test suite than I did in the article. their logs are mostly with me left. The device itself has returned to Intel and, most likely, some other tester is mocking her now.
In the comments - I will try to answer questions

PPS Even after I returned Nyusha to Intel, I learned with great chagrin that the portrait lens on my canon suddenly began to suffer a strong back focus, and the photo session turned out to be of a mediocre quality, some photos had to be even replaced with those found on the Internet. Please excuse me for this misstep.