[GTALUG] beware CherryTrail and BayTrail systems

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: phiscock at ee.ryerson.ca

| I have an Acer Aspire laptop, E5-511-P8C8, setup to dual boot Windows 8.1
| (ugh) and Linux Mint.

I really dislike Acer's naming conventions.  They don't tell me
enough.  And their website doesn't know this precise model.  Their
website does not appear to show specifications.

It seems to have been sold by Best Buy, but it is no longer on their
site.  Perhaps the model was unique to Best Buy.  They do that
sometimes to avoid price matching.

Here's a different E5-511.  All I can assume is that it has similar characteristics.
<http://www.acer.ca/ac/en/CA/content/model/NX.MPKAA.001>

The processor is a Celereon N2930.  It's a Bay Trail processor.

Since it came with 4G of RAM, I assume that it comes with 64-bit UEFI
and 64-bit Windows (32-bit consumer versions of Windows don't support
more than about 3G of RAM).  And perhaps even an ability to do legacy
MBR booting and a CSM to support BIOS calls.

Since it came with 4G of RAM, the Windows license was not free to
Acer.  This puts your notebook in a significantly higher price range
than my Acer netbook.

| HDMI out and sound work fine under Linux on this laptop. I can't think of
| anything that is problematic.

It seems that some Acer BayTrail notebooks (like yours and mine) work
fine with Linux.  I'm not sure why.  The processor marketing families
are different from the problematic ones.  The Acer notebooks are using
Celeron N2840 and N2930.

The other BayTrail things have processors called Atom Z3735F and the like.

I just tried HDMI out and sound on my Acer netbook.  Both worked well.
Going from 11.6" to 39" was a bit startling.  It could only drive the
display at 1920x1080, not 3840x2160.  At least some CherryTrails can
do UltraHD.

I cannot easily test those other boxes.