I'm hoping to upgrade soon to an Asrock z170 Extreme 7+ motherboard and i5 CPU. One reviewer on Youtube a couple of months ago said Linux works on this board, except for the Intel graphics. That's OK for the time being (I'll carry on using my old Nvidia) but eventually I'd like to have the Intel graphics working as well. Any of you Slackers have any experience with the z170 chipset and integrated graphics on the Skylake CPU?

Not a Slackware user, but anyways: According to this Phoronix article the Z170 chipset works fine with Linux.
Acceleration support for Skylake graphics (and other Skylake specific stuff) will come with kernel 4.3.

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Thanks Tobi. I obviously didn't search Google long enough!

You might want to check Linux-next for any Skylake support but beware, any support right now is mostly a get-it-working scenario rather than a full DRM driver. It will probably not have any support in libdrm, mesa, or xf86-video-intel, and if there is support, it will very minimal at best, but that's stretching the spaghetti.

Here's a good ting to remember.

Any hardware out for more than a year will probably have proper support in UNIX and UNIX-like systems. Anything less than a year is likely to not have full support.

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Thanks Reaper. I've been thinking about it and I might go for a cheap AMD FM2+ board just for a year or so till the z170 support stabilizes. My current setup - Core2Quad - has been running absolutely fine since 2008; the only problem is that the board is limited to 8GB RAM, which limits the virtual machines I run.

thats good.i also plan in next year upgrade to i5 skylake and z170 - my old, in 2007 purchased core2duo have lack of power now, because web is full of flash, java and so contents, who is ram and cpu hungry.
and then i can forget about computer upgrade for next 7 - 10 years

That's what I did. I have an AMD FX-8320 w/ 24GB RAM and a ASUS R9 270 (for my modest gaming needs). For my use case, this computer will perform admirably for the foreseeable future. Good thing too, since I am on a budget and my money must needs go elsewhere.

I have a Gigabyte Z170M-D3H Intel Z170 motherboard with Core i7-6700 processor and 16GB of DDR4 RAM.

I actually built this in December last year and installed Fedora 23 on it.

The only things I had to do in the BIOS was to select "Other OS" and select the USB key that has my Live install was on. I could easily boot from my USB key and had no problems installing Fedora 23 to my SSD system disk as well as creating three volumes for my 3TB data disk. Total install time took around 30 minutes but then I was installing off a USB 2 key.

If any one is thinking about getting a Z170 type motherboard make sure you get the latest BIOS firmware which is stupidly easy to install from a USB key.

I actually use the HDMI port on my mother board to connect to my monitor and use the other HDMI port to connect to my PS4 and if required my PS3. I can now switch via my LG IPS 24 inch 1080p monitor from PC to PS4/PS3 in a few seconds and back again if required. I did find that while the D-SUB does work to my monitor I loose signal when switching between PC to PS3/PS4 then back to my PC so I just stick to the HDMI ports which is not that bad since the inbuilt graphics can support up to 4K monitors.

I did try installing Mint in a virtual machine and I could install within 10 minutes. Even installing Fedora 23 KDE spin in a virtual machine took about 10 minutes but then I do have a 3TB 7200rpm 3.5" HDD.

Basically the bottom line is you can install the Redhat distributions such as Fedora and I am fairly confident you can also install Debian based (ie. Mint, Ubuntu) as well.

A word of caution here: I only use the motherboard graphics since I am not really into PC gaming preferring console gaming instead although simpler games do work. I can even run SNES9X and FCEUX perfectly if I wish to play a snes or even a nes game. I can't advise on a graphics card although I would be surprised if the majority don't work.

As for performance:

I am not into over-clocking so I did not get the "K" series CPU and with the latest firmware releases my CPU will shift between 800MHz to 4.0GHz rapidly depending on what I am doing. When idle or just surfing the web my whole PC draws less then 40W at room temperature and the highest power usage I have seen is 150W at 60 degrees C when I did some video translations. Put in a powerful graphics card or cards making sure your power supply can support them and you will probably draw a few hundred watts when playing a AAA game.

I have tried some benchmarks such as "glmark2" (3D graphincs) in a window (in full screen mode the overall performance suffers but it does work without any problems) and when running I get about 80% total CPU usage, 130W, 3.7GHz, negligible memory usage and a score value of 514 which is ok for simpler graphics.

For me my Desktop PC does everything I want and more. Yes you can get/build better and it will cost more, but then again you could build the best PC and within an hour someone has built a better one. :-)

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Slack 14.2 here with Asus Z170-A and i7-6700K and Plextor M6e 256GB SSD, M.2 ... and 32 GB DDR4 ...
nice board ..
nice speeeeeeeedddd ...
nice slack ...

no extra grafik card ... so i have just 30W when idle ...

greetings
Slacker

I have the Gigabyte Z170M-D3H Intel Z170 motherboard with an Intel Core i7-6700 Cpu and 16GB of DDR4 memory. When I built my PC in December of last year I installed Fedora 23 KDE spin without any issues and currently I have Fedora 24 KDE spin on it, again problem free and that Includes the Intel graphics.

What is very important here is to make sure you have the latest firmware for your motherboard (mine is "f7" but for Asrock I don't know) and to set your boot to "Other OS" since you only have Windows 8 and Windows 10 as alternative choices.

My monitor has two HDMI ports and one is connected to my PC via the Intel HDMI port while the other is connected to my PS4 or if I wish my PS3. I can switch between each one without any problems. My card also has a DVI port and it also works, but I will loose signal when I switch back from my PS4 to the PC so naturally I don't use it.

I also run Linux Mint 17.3 in a virtual machine and I had no problems installing it. I even have Windows 10 (locked down) installed via ISO and it does work but, it really does like to talk to the outside world (Wireshark is your friend here) and guess who owns the machines it talks to? and they are not in the same country (Australia) I live in. Needless to say, I hardly ever run Windows 10 since I can do everything I want with Linux.

Note. You may hit a secure boot issue (can be turned off in the motherboard) but most major current Linux distributions support secure boot anyway. If your installer wants to install secure boot (ie. /boot/efi on /dev/sda1) then the choice is yours but instead of allocating, say 500MB for /boot you can reduce that to about 50MB for /boot/efi and still have plenty left over (you won't need a /boot filesystem if you do this although /boot will be part of "/").

I do think the issue you will have is to allow for overclocking (ie. "K" model) or not since overclocking requires you to think seriously (well not that seriously) about cooling. If you are thinking about using virtual machines then I would suggest an i7 rather than an i5, but an i5 will still perform well.

In that article.

"various Skylake articles it's recommended to ideally be running Linux 4.3 Git due to finally enabling the Skylake graphics acceleration by default, audio support, and various other Skylake-specific support improvements in this latest kernel."

Hi,

question to you (with i7xxx and z170) - did you compile your kernel by yourself - where did you get the best options for this machine - witch kernel do you use ?

i am starting with config-huge-4.4.14 and then go on with the stable 4.6.6 by "make olddefconfig" and there after "make menuconfig" and trowing away any thing i know i dont need.

the rest is some trial and error by inspecting the kernel log while booting ...
and searching thru the internet for informations ...

If you're generally happy with Pat's configs, he's already done a 4.6 kernel config in the testing/ directory.

https://slackbuilds.org/mirror/slack...x-4.6-configs/

gigabyte z170x gaming 7 + i7 6700k --> all working well.

re hi,
after i have had my "thousend" kernel parameters done - i would change again - the 4.6.x comes to EOL with 4.6.7 and there are some things i don't like either ...

the lm_sensors can't rearlly find my sensors, maybe because there seemed to be a bug with ....

i can't come back to 4.4.xx because the lack of usb 3.1 support ...

any ideas ?

witch kernel do you use with z170 and i7-6xxx(k) .... ?