Some Ryzen Linux Users Are Facing Issues With Heavy Compilation Loads

[brent]

Kaveri has worked perfectly for years for me, there are no specific stability issues known.

As for Intel being the "safe" choice, note that Intel also had serious stability issues with Skylake and with Haswell they had to disable the TSX feature because it was broken. (How did they ever get away with this? They permanently disabled a feature that the CPU was advertised with!)

[mulenmar]

...

(How did they ever get away with this? They permanently disabled a feature that the CPU was advertised with!)

The same way Sony got away with getting rid of OtherOS on the PS3: they have a lot of money (and, thus, lawyers), and the minority of users who even understand it, let alone care, don't*.

* Those folks who had the money to throw around to build PS3 clusters using it...spent it all on said clusters. :P Or just never updated the firmware.

[Nite_Hawk]

Hi Guys, I'm one of the Ceph developers. I'm seeing this on my 1700x now pretty regularly on an ASUS Taichi X370 with ubuntu 17.04. This chip has never been overclocked. 16GB of DDR4-3200 running at 2100 in 2 DIMMs. Definitely not overclocking related and no indication the memory is bad. Can verify that once it starts happening the system appears to destabilize pretty quickly.

[mblnx]

Nite_Hawk, disable the OPCache Code on the bios as it improved a lot the segfaults. I have just started testing with the randomize_va_space set to 0. My machine hasn't segfaulted in a while, but I have not really been stressing it. I did have problems with unexpected zfs crashes leading to complete freezes, but I haven't seen one of this since the bios upgrade.

[Chewi]

Fedora 26 Alpha held up 25 hours for me so I booted into Gentoo with the Fedora kernel and that held up too. Now I've built my own kernel using the same configuration so I'll see how that goes. It's starting to look like there's some crucial element I didn't enable so I just need to work out which one. I'm wondering if it's IOMMU-related because I got a bunch of errors unless I booted with iommu=pt before. Now I don't need to do that.

[Chewi]

Have you tried disabling the boost frequency, checking that Vcore is 1.2 Volts, and lowering operating frequency below the default frequency (for example: 3.0GHz in case the default frequency is 3.2GHz (Ryzen 5 1600))?

I don't see why I should mess with that stuff when simply changing the kernel configuration stops the freezing.

[nils_]

As for Intel being the "safe" choice, note that Intel also had serious stability issues with Skylake and with Haswell they had to disable the TSX feature because it was broken. (How did they ever get away with this? They permanently disabled a feature that the CPU was advertised with!)

I was really surprised there was no class-action lawsuit about this. Although I don't know if TSX is also broken in Skylake, it was broken in Broadwell (not Broadwell E though). But compared to the AMD problem the TSX problem is hard to trigger.

[soulsource]

I've found that on my Ryzen R7 1700X running on an MSI B350M Mortar mainboard the segfaults during compilation happen much more frequent with gcc-4.9.4 than with gcc-6.3.0, so if some AMD engineers want to reproduce them for debugging purposes, I'd recommend to use that older gcc version.

[nils_]

I don't see why I should mess with that stuff when simply changing the kernel configuration stops the freezing.

You're disabling a security feature to work round broken hardware...

[Beherit]

Still no fix from AMD for this. Their last official post about this is more than a week old now, where they urge users to try out disabling OPCache Control and SMT. That and all other reported "fixes" so far, make crashes less frequent. Even though many report significant improvements, crashes still occur. So the main issue remains...

I certainly hope AMD is still working on this and not just silently praying that the workarounds are "good enough" for forum chatter to die.

Kudos to Matt dillon and his AMD CPU hacking skillz, I didn't know he's uncovered other fatal hardware bugs in the past: http://techreport.com/news/22586/bsd...amd-processors