AMD Zen/Ryzen thread (part 2)

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20583

They're replacing CPUs though,aren't they? That would work for me. If I had the spare cash for an entirely new system, I'd buy one.
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Tony0945 · Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2017 2:27 am Post subject:

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

because many batteries are already produce...
you are comparing a batteries with latest cpu, they have start mass production few days before release, now that it is fix, it will again take days before they have enough good units to feed everyone.

I wonder if amd plan to keep selling bad units stock, because windows users are not really able to see the problem.
That would kill second hands market for ryzen.

And resellers buying in grey market are fucked for good and will keep selling bad units

Tony0945 · Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2017 1:25 pm Post subject:

mir3x · Guru Joined: 02 Jun 2012 Posts: 455

nasaiya · Apprentice Joined: 17 May 2007 Posts: 157

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20583

thumper · Guru Joined: 06 Dec 2002 Posts: 554 Location: Venice FL

Bloot · Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 5:20 pm Post subject:

I'm done with AMD.

I sent my faulty CPU two weeks ago, they said they'd send me a replacement as soon as I'd send them the parcel tracking number. They wrote yesterday saying they were restocking their warehouse, and that it would not be completed until october 2nd. That means 3 weeks, at best, since I sent my faulty processor.

I liked Ryzen very much but this is unacceptable, I'd rather contact Amazon if I knew it would take this long. I'll sell it the moment it arrives, if it ever does.

Sorry for the rant, I needed it.

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20583

Sorry to hear you're that disappointed by a delay, but everyone has their limits. Mine was the Intel monopoly.
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Bloot · Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 8:15 pm Post subject:

I wouldn't exactly call a three weeks wait a delay, but nevermind.

Hope they can finally adress this problem and replace every faulty unit, I won't be on the boat anymore. It was nice to share Ryzen experiences with you all though

Cheers

mir3x · Guru Joined: 02 Jun 2012 Posts: 455

nasaiya · Apprentice Joined: 17 May 2007 Posts: 157

vaxbrat · l33t Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 731 Location: DC Burbs

My Taichi based build on kernel 4.12.12 has been up for over two days now without a lockup. The last thing I tweaked on that one is the SOC VCC getting set to 1.18 volts. I did leave cool and quiet turned on. I need to get my cluster on the same version of Ceph Jewel before I put a couple of OSD daemons on it.

My Gaming k4 build was still locking up yesterday even though I made the VCC change. I was about to turn off cool and quiet and considered switching from on-demand to performance cpu governor but I decided to switch to 4.13.3 on it and took George's advice above about the RCU settings. It's been good so far and even appears able to use all 16 cores to emerge mesa with gcc 6.4.0. I'm going to hold off on 7 until there's better agreement about both stability and zen support. I've been pleasantly surprised by amdgpu support and wine allowing me to play Fallout New Vegas. The last time I had that working was with a Geforce and Nvidia-drivers before all the insanity started happening with that and the KDE Plasma compositor in opengl mode.

thumper · Guru Joined: 06 Dec 2002 Posts: 554 Location: Venice FL

Naib · Posted: Sun Oct 01, 2017 9:43 pm Post subject: Re: possible kernel gotcha

thumper · Guru Joined: 06 Dec 2002 Posts: 554 Location: Venice FL

amaroc · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Nov 2005 Posts: 99

As this is "Gentoo Chat" and it's Ryzen related I post it here - even if I do not really contribute to the Ryzen technical discussion. Think it might be interesting to some - otherwise please skip.
Summary about an upgrade to Ryzen CPU
Two weeks a go my good old Phenom II X6 1055T (6x2.80GHz) died all of a sudden. It might have been the motherboard as well as there was literally nothing - no screen, no beep no other sign of life. I tried some disconnect/connect cycles for cards and cables around, CMOS battery replacement and RTC reset, measured power supply - but no joy. So either CPU or mobo died somehow. Ok, this is what may happen after 7 years and more than 10k hours running.
Time to think about an update or other options.
- Android tablet only? - not much fun, not really
- Laptop? - the tablet allows for this flexibility already
So there shall be a desktop update.
- ARM or x86? - I've got still some x86 code around and w/ ARM I would very likely end up with Android someday - no!
- AMD or Intel? - One year ago I would probably have decided for Intel but there is Ryzen now for some time.
OK, so reading about Ryzen than - OMG - even this thread and the predecessor are full of segfault messages, memory incompatibilities, etc.
In addition - do I want to continue with Gentoo? I'm still running grub legacy, never thought about UEFI and overall - I want the system up and running asap as at least online banking needs to get restored soon.That will require a proper browser in a graphical environment - so I will need a quick graphics card decision as well.
- AMD or nVidia? - AMD seems to be more on open source - so that was easy
- Old or new chip family? - As my screen is also almost ten years old I should look for something more recent. I was brave and decided for the RX550.
So, mobo decision was easy - ASUS prime B350-PLUS as there is an (onboard) SPDIF out and the reviews are not bad. For DDR4 I decided for SR Crucial - 2400 speed grade seems to be sufficient and 2x 8GB is an improvement over the old 12GB. A Ryzen 1700 with the bundled fan should also be sufficient. As my 2GB HDD was a bit tight already I decided for a 8TB update as well. Everything else - 1TB SSD, DVD-RW, BD-ROM, case, power supply, etc. should stay. The mobo requires an 8-pin EATX 12V connector but my power supply has a 4-pin ATX 12V connector - Google said that this is OK.
So, I ordered the items above and after some days I could start the assembly, booted into the BIOS, made an update to the recent BIOS version - here we are.
Now - what to boot? Even if I have recent backups on external drives I wanted to re-use my installation as much as possible and therefore doing a tar backup of my SSD root partition seemed to be a good idea.
A little bit out of curiosity I decided for Ubuntu 17.10 beta as there should be a recent kernel, graphics, etc.
I ended up with acpi=off and a gnome desktop. Not bad and OK for a tar backup but chroot and compile a kernel on one core out of eight? That's no fun. So I tared my SSD root partition just in case and decided for a Gentoo installation medium.
What - the CD image does not support UEFI and the DVD is about one year old? As I'm lazy I decided against UEFI and switched to the legacy boot scheme with the Gentoo CD image.
The genkernel booted fine, all 8 cores were there and I could chroot. I took the opportunity to go for grub2 according wiki and followed the Ryzen kernel instruction. Playing safe I decided for Generic-x86-64, gcc 5.4.0 and -march=x86-64.
The next boot showed a nice grub2 menu but the kernel crashed again - with good old 80x25 I couldn't see much. I tried memtest86 from the install medium - it crashed as well. It took me some time to understand that the old memtest86 does not like the Ryzen so I decided to continue the journey.
Why not being brave and use the old Phenom kernel? Surprise - it booted and even Xorg and KDE did start - wow! OK, I was on six cores rather than eight (+8x HT) as my Phenom customization was still in but that was acceptable for a kernel update. The old ATI radeon code obviously worked even for Xorg and I didn't care about sw rendering at all.
So I modified the kernel slightly to have eight cores plus ht - that was easy.
Later I performed an incremetal kernel update process according Ryzen kernel instruction and found the IOMMU option to be the root cause. Google told me that this might be an issue on ASUS and B350 motherboards - but I do not really need this feature right now - so it stays out for now.
As I was OK with the current graphics solution and Xorg-log and system-log stayed quite I decided for some stability tests. gcc compile gave me some non Ryzen issues for tmpfs inodes and docbook issues but beside that everythings runs rock solid. I did a bunch of parallel emerges on gcc and webkit-gtk utilizing all cores and a lot of memory and didn't had any issue.
Clearly there will be more work to do for gcc flags, AMDGPU, sensors, etc. but that's not urgent at all.

Summary:
I'm very pleased with the update process and after 12 years with Gentoo I have to admit - Gentoo still rocks :-)

Naib · Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2017 9:08 am Post subject: Re: possible kernel gotcha

Chewi · Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2017 9:14 am Post subject:

Hello all. I'm back after going through the RMA process. I was 2½ weeks without my desktop.

Could have been worse but I expected better. It only took 4 days for my old CPU to reach the warehouse in the Netherlands but it took them another 13 days to deliver the replacement. At least it gave me time to play with my ARM box.

I can see that the replacement was manufactured in 1730 (July) and the good news is that the segfaults appear to have gone after re-enabling ASLR. The not so good news is that I still got a freeze overnight after disabling the RCU stuff. There's a chance that this may have been down to the amd-staging DC stuff but I have my doubts. Trying without that at the moment. I could turn the RCU stuff back on but not having C6 sucks for power usage and I really want to get to the bottom of it. Now that the segfaults are ruled out, I will try to find out more. Maybe I'll contact Gigabyte.

@nasaiya, what motherboard do you have?

fcl · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 31 Dec 2016 Posts: 77

To be fair C6 doesn't lower power usage THAT much. I wouldn't worry about it

thumper · Guru Joined: 06 Dec 2002 Posts: 554 Location: Venice FL

Naib · Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2017 8:24 pm Post subject: Re: possible kernel gotcha

Chewi · Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2017 10:04 pm Post subject:

So disabling DC didn't help. Now I've disabled "Global C-State Control" in the BIOS, which I gather disables C6. That should hold up but I want to check it makes a difference.

When it did freeze, I was able to capture the kernel output using netconsole. To the other people experiencing freezes, it would be great if you could try netconsole so that we can compare notes.