Radeon RX 6800 Series Performance Comes Out Even Faster With Newest Linux Code

[lyamc]

Hey duby, just wanted to say that you’ve earned all of my respect. It takes a big person to apologize like that.

I’ll try to be more kind in the future.

[varikonniemi]

Maybe duby could share the evidence of his claim that “AMD’s code sucks”.

Until he can do that, I think it’s fair to just ignore him.

Just check out this senior driver engineer being schooled like a high school student on his errors https://linuxreviews.org/Sensor_Fusi..._To_Linux_5.11 i have honestly not seen anything like it and AMD should be embarrassed to have him hired, let alone in a senior position

[rabcor]

Now we're talkin!

[zeb_]

If I bought a RTX 3080, I would have to start Linux in nomodeset, install NVIDIA driver from website or add a ppa since I use Ubuntu. Everything works great.
If I bought a 6800XT, I would have to start Linux in nomodeset, download firmware, use ppa for latest kernel, use ppa for latest mesa, use ppa for latest LLVM. Going by my 5700XT experience: some games work, some crash, browsers may crash, GIMP may crash. Crashes didn't stop for me until a year after 5700XT launch.

In 6 months, everything that the 6800XT needs will probably be in Ubuntu 21.04 and I will have to do nothing to make it work.

Or you could use Archlinux
On a serious note, a rolling release distribution with packaging of GPU drivers may be a good choice with very recent hardware.

[bridgman]

Or you could use Archlinux
On a serious note, a rolling release distribution with packaging of GPU drivers may be a good choice with very recent hardware.

One of our developers tried installing Manjaro a couple of days ago and it seems to have ready-to-go support for the 6800/XT cards now including firmware. He did have to select the 5.10 kernel via settings manager.

[BreezeDM]

Or you could use Archlinux
On a serious note, a rolling release distribution with packaging of GPU drivers may be a good choice with very recent hardware.

In October 2019 (3 months after release), OpenSUSE Tumbleweed was in worse shape than Ubuntu 19.10. I didn't look at Arch, but rolling release distros are not always the latest because they update things when they feel like it. Since 19.10 just came out, it was ahead of most rolling releases. 1-2 months later (4-5 months after release), it was probably newer, but at that time you pretty much had to use git nightlys. You are 100% correct, if you use AMD graphics, you should be on a rolling release distro.

[duby229]

In October 2019 (3 months after release), OpenSUSE Tumbleweed was in worse shape than Ubuntu 19.10. I didn't look at Arch, but rolling release distros are not always the latest because they update things when they feel like it. Since 19.10 just came out, it was ahead of most rolling releases. 1-2 months later (4-5 months after release), it was probably newer, but at that time you pretty much had to use git nightlys. You are 100% correct, if you use AMD graphics, you should be on a rolling release distro.

I mean if you use linux -at all- you should be on a rolling release distro. Every single component, every package, gets released on a rolling cycle. So called "stable" distro's aren't stable at all. If the -entire- concept of a so called "stable" distro was abandoned, there wouldn't be any need to backport anything at all.

If you choose a so called "stable" distro, then you are choosing to wait for backports. That's a choice -you- make.

EDIT: Ubuntu has one advantage, it's the most commonly used distro, so release cycles generally tend to allign with it. But it's certainly not anywhere near as good as a rolling release distro.

[bridgman]

Yeah, we were just discussing this internally re: launch time support for new products...

Rolling release distros are the easiest to support via upstream - as long as you have working code upstream the distros will probably pick it up quickly.

Enterprise distros almost always move too slowly for upstream-based support but are relatively easy to support with DKMS-based packaged drivers.

Distros on a ~6 month release cycle actually turn out to be the hardest - they update quickly enough to make DKMS-based support a lot of work, but they still end up with code that is 3-12 months old on average. Of course the flip side is that a ~6 month release cycle gives a nice balance between stability and newness, which I guess helps with popularity.

That said, when I looked in Steam's Linux stats I was surprised to see that Arch + Manjaro together had almost as much share as Ubuntu 20.04 (11%, 11%, 24%). It was also nice to see the RX480 as the most popular GPU in the list.

[Etherman]

bridgman
Since stuff is in upstream, kernel, Xorg and Mesa, couldn't you just support minimum version of those instead?
"minimum version required Linux x.x, Mesa x.x and Xorg x.x"

[duby229]

bridgman
Since stuff is in upstream, kernel, Xorg and Mesa, couldn't you just support minimum version of those instead?
"minimum version required Linux x.x, Mesa x.x and Xorg x.x"

Not if those versions got released before the support was added. If you want a so called "stable" distro to have that support, then it needs to be backported to the versions used in that so called "stable" distro.

Rolling release, you simply update versions. "Stable" release, you backport to the versions included in the distro. (Just think about how many distros there are and how many different combinations of versions there are. There is no possible way that a so called "stable" distro can actually be stable. Even by their own definition of "stable" due to the massive amounts of backporting they require.)

"Stable" distro is an oxymoron of the highest order.