Planning on buying a new machine to act as a server at work and was wondering if there are any issues with running 14.1 on Skylake generation hardware. I glanced over some threads that raised issues with running kernels older than 4.4 on Skylake hardware. I should mention that I'm not going to run in runlevel 4.

It doesn't make any sense to go Skylake as the CPU and required motherboard is too new for reliable support in the Slackware-14.1 default kernel. I'm running the older Haswell-E (i7-5820K) on an X99 (Wellsburg) chipset, and stock 14.1 is a bit glitchy at times (acpi, pcie, and running qemu). Slackware-current with kernel 4.4 is smoother and faster.

Do you need Skylake? File server? Web Server? You may not need as much oomph. If you do, just go with Current. Its 14.2-beta so "real soon now!"

Anyone actually running Skylake/hd520 on current? How well is it working at present?

The machine is going to be a router, firewall, VPN server, web (PHP&MySQL) server, ftp server. It will replace a very old Pentium 4 machine that is getting increasingly slow on serving complex php pages. Plus, it's time to replace it for reliability and power consumption reasons. So no, I don't really need Skylake, but since I'm going to keep this machine running for many years (I think the current one I've put together 9 years ago) I'd like to at least have the latest hardware at the time of purchase.

So I'll wait a little for 14.2 to be released. What is the plan so far with 14.2, release it with kernel 4.4 or 4.1? Does 4.4 have everything needed to run on Skylake or are there features still in development?

4.4 is already the default kernel in -current. My guess is that it will stay in the 4.4 series as that is an LTS kernel, and Slackware will probably be released with a point release of the 4.4 series kernel.

No clue about the Skylake support...

I have 6700K / AsRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming itx/ac (on current64 multilib). With kernel 4.3.x and 4.4 it works fine, no stability issues. HD P530 is stable in games (steam; I play adventure point-and-click games). But it is very slow (almost unusable) playing flash, maybe because of libvdpau-va-gl which I had to install in order to run some video players. VLC also has troubles with some movies, I have to rebuild it to check if this will fix the issues. I use SMPlayer with no problems for now.

'sensors' reports only the CPU temperatures, no fan rpm or other data.

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Skylake works fine with kernel 4.4 with a couple of adjustments. I have posted a couple of times before on this:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...be-4175563928/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...5/#post5473139
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post5471879

I have no problems with flash or vlc here. I have the same meagre input from sensors (only CPU temp). Since this is a fanless PC it will not show any fan rpm.

Yesterday I updated to the latest BIOS. It contains CPU microcode which fixes this bug.

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Flash is only unusable in Firefox. AlienBOB's Chromium plays it with no issues.

You might try out the latest version of Firefox v.44 and see if that helps?

I'm running Skylake with 14.1 using a custom 4.3 kernel.

My issues with CPU (i5-6600K) and other things:

HD 530 graphics is not supported by Xorg intel driver. Solution: try to upgrade Xorg (have not tried yet, I run with a separate graphics card).
LILO does not support NVMe disks. Solution: use Syslinux/extlinux or go with EFI boot. I use extlinux.
Killer ethernet 2400 network card not recognized. Have to patch kernel for the device ID.
Other than these, the system is very stable. I'm using KDE as the desktop environment.

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Just checked that Seamonkey works fine with flash. So hopefully the next -current update will fix all my issues related to flash. I guess the Firefox rebuild with the proper optimization flags could help.

I would recommend you just find a good deal on a tried and tested Broadwell CPU/motherboard, even Haswell will do. Considering you have made do with Pentium 4 for this long, you will not need anything Skylake has to offer. Anyways, the CPU generation has very little impact on a general purpose server. It's the quality and support of the other components. Unless willing to spend on a server board, I find gaming boards make good servers. Either Gigabyte or Asus should be good. Then disable the onboard NIC(s) and go with a couple good Intel PCIe NICs. Motherboard, NICs, drives, PSU and fans are much more important on a self build / home server. And of course use ECC RAM if you can afford to.

Skylake has some glitches found after production started (not good for Intel), and there may be more to come. The best machines I've used (server and desktop) are all Ivy-Bridge.

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