PeppermintTesting

Peppermint OS Testing Wiki

This is the Peppermint OS testing wiki, we will use this as a the place to go to get testing links for the builds that are prepped before release.

A few NOTES:
If you can please submit bug found here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/peppermintos/pil/

Any thing you post pertaining to testing on the forums, we will try to get them in to that issues tracker.

What were the changes foo this build:
Most of these things are under the hood.

• Debian 13 base
• Calamares has some structural changes. - From our testing we fixed the MBR install error
• Some of the PepTools were adjusted (I will go into details in the final release)
• The Deb822 standard was applied for the sources.
• Took out packages that were no longer supported.

The October release will be for the Flagship - This the almost zero bloat release meaning not really much is installed.
The other builds will begin to trickle in over the course of the next few months.

Testing links
https://nightly.peppermintos.org/deb64/flagship/

Thank you all so much for helping us test

[OldTon]

@peppermintos
OldTon speaking here
I installed succesfolly xfce
Then I went to synaptic--looked for task-install-cinnamon and went ahead
after reboot I went to synaptic and removed all xfce4 and otheobvious libs
Then I rebooted adai
___there was no icon for the terminal in taskbar
--?click on desktop--click on : open in terminal , nothing happened
Installing terminal-Gnomr fixed the 2nd one , but no icon in taskba
Thats all for today

All is working fine just now in Cinnamon, on my 15 year old G450

[OldTon]

Hi, OldTon again
Today, Friday-10-october-25 I did a new install on 15 year old Bios Lenovo.
The iso used was from oct-10-02
a Install went 100% fine and flawlessly
b Immediatly went to synaptic -- used task-cinnamon-desktop
all went fine
c rebooted -- removed thunar and xfce related packages
d rebooted and checked up---all seems to be OK, including Terminal
e installed all my needed/wanted packages

just one thing--->I used the startup screen to activate Flatpak--. it does so, but I see nothing in the menu ? ? ?
see you around

[Tim McConnell]

Hi guys,
I tried it as a QEMU-KVM and it seems to be slow. Is there a recommended number of CPUs? I currently have 2 assigned to it and it maxes the CPUs when I try to do anything.
Have a wonderful day.

[Peppermint OS]

I have not seen this issue in my testing.....
QEMU defaults to a generic CPU model (qemu64) that hides many host capabilities. This can bottleneck performance.

You can configure the VM using one of these options:

• Use host CPU passthrough to expose all host processor features:
  -cpu host
• This allows Peppermint to use all instruction sets like SSE4, AVX, etc..
• Or, expose specific extensions if passthrough isn’t possible:
  -cpu qemu64,+ssse3,+sse4.1,+sse4.2,+x2apic

You can verify what flags Peppermint sees with:
grep flags /proc/cpuinfo | uniq
and compare with the host system.

Disk & I/O performance tuning
Apply these:

• Use VirtIO block and network devices rather than IDE or SATA.
• Use raw disk images instead of qcow2 for better I/O throughput.
• In virt-manager or QEMU XML, set:
  • Disk cache to none or writeback
  • I/O mode to native

Memory and host system considerations

• Increase memory if you can; frequent swapping drastically slows KVM guests.
• Ensure your host isn’t constrained leave at least 1–2 cores and 2 GB RAM for the host OS.
• Enable HugePages on the host (/etc/sysctl.conf → vm.nr_hugepages=...) for reduced memory overhead.
• Avoid running VMs on a filesystem using Copy-on-Write (like Btrfs or qcow2 with snapshots) if raw performance is your goal.

Troubleshooting

1. Check host-side CPU contention:
   top -H | grep qemu
2. Watch I/O wait times:
   iostat -x 1 5
3. Measure if CPU instructions are limited by virtualization:
   lscpu | grep Virtualization
   Ensure hardware virtualization (VT-x/AMD-V) is enabled.
   4.If performance remains poor, try pinning CPUs to a specific NUMA node or physical cores using taskset orlibvirt vCPUpinning features.

Hope that helps