FOG Very Slow to Deploy Image - Lenovo Neo 50Q Gen 4

[Quintin Giesbrecht]

@JJ-Fullmer Thanks for your reply! You have given me some places to at least look. I agree, if it was slowing down because of decompression, you would think it would be more widespread (unless there is some sort of issue/difference with the storage adapter and/or drive in these machines). My compression level is set to 6.

I will enable detailed kernel logging and see if that reveals anything.

This is not end of the world for me. I can still image a machine in about half an hour on these slow ones, but it is nice to be able to just send out an image to a machine if someone’s computer goes squirly and have them running in 10 minutes (plus, I think most of us sys admins have it in us to try and figure out why something isn’t working as expected )

Thanks again!

Q

[Tom Elliott]

@Quintin-Giesbrecht Would there be a potential of finding out if it’s specific to the ssd by removing it from one of these “slow” lenovos, put the drive in one of your normally fast machines, and try to send the image to it?

if it’s slow in the same way, it’s definitely something scoped to the SSD itself, if it’s fast, it’s likely something specific to these Lenovo Neo 50Q Gen 4 devices.

Just my 2 cents.

[Quintin Giesbrecht]

@Tom-Elliott Yeah, that would be a good test to do…thanks for that suggestion.

[Quintin Giesbrecht]

@Tom-Elliott So I moved an SSD from a slow machine to a machine that is running at full speed, and I can confirm that I get full speed out of the drive, so that rules that out.

Can someone tell me where I can enable/adjust logging levels for the kernel? I couldn’t seem to find it in the web gui.

Thanks!

[Quintin Giesbrecht]

@Tom-Elliott @JJ-Fullmer Never mind, I found the logging levels. So now that I have the level maxed, where do I find the logs? Is that still in the web gui somewhere?

Thanks!

[JJ Fullmer]

@Quintin-Giesbrecht It’s been a while since I’ve had to mess with it, if memory serves it may show in the output of the imaging itself. You might need to do a deploy in debug mode on a fast/normal speed machine and then a slow one and compare what you see.

You may also find some logs in the log viewer of fog within the fog configuration page. Where the logs are on the server depend on your fog version and your OS version.

Like for me on Rocky 9 with Fog 1.6 and using apache with php 8 the log with the most information is /var/log/php-fpm/www-error.log but I don’t believe kernel level stuff will output there.

[olivier.bonnici]

Greetings.
Same issue here with LENOVO Neo 50s Gen 5 Desktop series.
Every other model works fine, but not this one.
Capture at 10 Gib/min, but deploy a 600 Mib/min.
The network port is 1 gbit/s during both opération.

Updated fog to the latest 1.5.1660, same issue, testing the beta Linux kernel 6.12.25 / Buildroot 2025.02.0 : same.

Realy stuck here, i’m waiting 200 others same PC on september 2025.

We tested on 3 differents FOG server in different location : same issues.

Thanks for any help.

[george1421]

@olivier-bonnici If you have time to test, I have an idea what maybe causing this. I just saw a video on hacking a chromebox (seemingly unrelated), and they had a similar issue with downloads being unnaturally slow but uploads were OK.

It came down to the energy efficient ethernet built into the realtek nic.

What I want you to do this this:

1. schedule another deployment to this hardware, before you hit the schedule task button tick the debug checkbox then schedule the task.
2. PXE boot the target computer, it should go right into imaging, well it should drop you to a linux command prompt after several screens of text.
3. At the linux command prompt, we need to find the name of the ethernet adapter device. Issue the following command ip a s . Look in the list for the network device that has an IP address. Write down that name for the next stel.
4. Use the linux tool ethtool to disable ‘eee’ on the network adapter, in this case the ethernet adapter name is eno0 yours might be different, fix accordingly ethtool --set-eee eno0 eee off
5. On success of setting green ethernet to off lets start the imaging process. Key in fog and press enter. This will place you in single step mode. You will need to press enter at each breakpoint in the code but you will be able to see the partclone screen to see if the speed has improved.

I don’t know specifically if this is your issue but its worth a shot. If it does work we can do a few things to make this a forever change, but first we need to find out if it works or not.

[olivier.bonnici]

@george1421 Thank you for your help.
When i enter the eee off command, the system tells me it is already disabled.
I try downloading an image, but same low speed at 600 Mib/min.

I have changed the nvme drive by an old SSD : same low speed ><.

[olivier.bonnici]

@olivier-bonnici Edit : Works better with an older Kernel !
Deploy with kernel 5.68 from october 2022 is running at 3-4 Gbits/min.

[olivier.bonnici]

@Quintin-Giesbrecht Hello ! A friend of mine have added the correct driver into the bzimage file.
I can get 12 Gib/min with this modified kernel.