AMD's Raven Ridge Botchy Linux Support Appears Worse With Some Motherboards/BIOS

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD's Raven Ridge Botchy Linux Support Appears Worse With Some Motherboards/BIOS

With my launch testing of the Raven Ridge desktop APUs with the Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G there were some stability issues to report and some hangs within games and mode-setting issues. It appears those issues are exacerbated with some motherboards: the past few days with two different AMD B350 motherboards have been a real pain getting the current AMDGPU driver stack working -- and even Linux 4.17 AMDGPU WIP code -- on either of these Raven Ridge APUs...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Raven-Ridge-Mobo-Linux

[FireBurn]

I'm going to wait and get a mini-ITX X470 or B450 board when they come out, assuming of course they have a HDMI 2.0 connector on them #cantWait #isItMarchYet

[Guest]

I'm going to wait and get a mini-ITX X470 or B450 board when they come out, assuming of course they have a HDMI 2.0 connector on them #cantWait #isItMarchYet

This. HDMI 2.0 is a must. Sadly most current AMD mini ITX motherboards don't have HDMI 2.0 or more than one Displayport.

[zoomblab]

I am glad I didn't wait for raven ridge when I built my Ryzen system a couple of weeks ago. I considered to do so but I have been burned with my older Radeon 7870 which IMO has always been in eternal beta support level, plus I don't like the way AMD has went with their multiple drivers that never work 100% properly. So I got a Ryzen 1700 with an 1050 Ti. A bit more expensive combination with closed driver but you know what? It works perfectly and also I didn't have to upgrade half of my OS stack to get it working!

AMD people, I do appreciate your hard work and support for Linux BUT please consider to put the end user experience at the center of your software strategy and try to be competitive with what Nvidia offers in that respect. For me open source is a plus but is not the end goal.

[davidbepo]

this is interesting since my build will also use asus b350m-e

[_Alex_]

I don't think it's an open source issue... more like a "proper support" issue... apparently AMD doesn't even have the staff required to do proper linux testing and the programming required to get a decent linux experience. While I don't want to compare, at least Intel stuff generally plays under linux... and this thing has become a factor where you see an AMD product that is attractive but you kind of expect that it will fail in a hundred different ways under linux and thus you tend to avoid it. So you end up choosing a less attractive Intel product instead - when you shouldn't have to do that.

[M@GOid]

The motherboard AMD chose for Windows dedicated sites to use is the Gigabyte GA-AB350N, a Mini-ITX mobo. Maybe that one is better tested.

[Ray54]

Extremely useful article, as I was thinking of getting a Ryzen APU for playing about with. However, as even you are having problems with reliability, then most of us normal users don't stand a chance. My 3 gaming desktops and 1 laptop are all currently Intel/Nvidia based, but a long time ago all my computers were AMD and I would like to support AMD again. I really hope the Linux community can sort the problems out in the next few months, so that loweer-end 350 chip-set motherboards are reliable with Ryzen APUs under Linux. As I have not seen the same complaints under Windows, I am assuming the problems are in the Linux drivers, so should be fixable by driver experts.

When the problems are fixed, please announce it very clearly.

[cybertraveler]

Is this a pattern with AMD? Initial Open Source support is there, but incomplete and buggy. We have to wait some months for everything to bake. Vega graphics was like this. It started out such that you couldn't get an image on your display with the stable kernel release. Now it's all working with stable Linux and Mesa, but still a bit rough around the edges, but seemingly improving.

If the above pattern is true it's a shame, but tolerable for me. I'm happy to wait 6 months after launch before buying AMD hardware if it means I get a fully Open Source stack. If I chose hardware with Open Source drivers, the pay-off comes later when the equivalent, proprietary hardware has bugs or is not being updated to support new APIs/distros/configs and the vendor isn't fixing the issue. In this case I'm very heavily dependent on the will and whims of the proprietary driver vendor. In the case of AMD and other Open Source driver supporting hardware vendors there are lots of people and organisations that I can go to, to get help. I could even start a crowd funded bounty to get it fixed.

[andrei_me]

Perhaps this is why AMD hadn't offered any review samples this time around for our Linux testing or even briefed on the launch

IMHO, they should give you the hardware anyway and say it is not ready for linux yet, be transparent about the current situation