From The Linux Perspective: What I Am Most Looking Forward To In 2019

[rossi123]

My Wishlist:

• Wayland dies off because of its retarded devs' opinions (and consequently, worthless design and limitations).
• Linux either gets a DLL loader and everyone uses it for libraries, or a new convention is done that all distros obey, or the loader gets replaced with one that eliminates the retarded global symbol namespace of ELF, forcing every symbol to specify exactly which module it is from (or each symbol to be in the module's table). First step towards sane userland.
• Library devs go from retarded to average and finally stop breaking the fucking ABI, ever. They extend their library with new functions / classes if needed, deprecate old but NEVER remove them from the library (if anything, make them a wrapper for the new one, that's okay). Just like the Linux Kernel or Windows APIs. (need a function with more options? add Ex suffix or call it func2 or w/e, like Windows/Linux respectively). Second step towards sane userland.
• Failing the above, more devs to target Wine instead of avoiding a port to Linux altogether due to its retarded userland. Having Wine as "officially supported" (or at least a given Wine version) should be good.

thank you for your help

[Compartmentalisation]

Why would your Ryzen R7 1700 need any help with video decoding? It should be fast enough by far to decode any contemporary video even in 4k resolution... and since it's not a laptop, power consumption should not be an issue.

Just pay the power bill. Just ignore the fans. Just don't do anything else while watching a video. Just never get a laptop with Linux. It's easy.

[dwagner]

Let me guess. It locked up when CPU was idling? This seems to be an issue with first gen Ryzen and can be worked around by finding the following setting in BIOS and setting it to 'typical idle current'

Advanced > AMD CBS > Zen Common Options > Power Supply Idle Control

This is disabling C6, just like one can do in software via "zenstates.py --c6-disable" - I tried that once but it is completely unrelated to my amdgpu issues, and my Ryzen (when using amdgpu.dc=0) is stable with or without it.

[dwagner]

Regarding amdgpu stability: I've seen definite improvements over the last few years there. I also realize at one point that what I was blaming on an amdgpu kernel driver bug was actually CPU-induced instability. I swapped out my Ryzen R7 1700 for a R7 2700 this year, and immediately went from having hard-locks on my machine every week or so to the machine surviving multiple weeks at a time (before I inevitably reboot for a kernel upgrade or something).

Lucky you. But I am very sure the instability I see is not CPU-related - I can reproduce the amdgpu crashes (including amdgpu-issued kernel messages) within minutes by just replaying a video at 3fps - while the machine runs 100% stable when just displaying a console prompt and made to work on whatever workload issued via ssh from remote.

Which leads me to my top wishlist item: Video Decode acceleration in Firefox on Linux, ideally in a wayland session.

Why would your Ryzen R7 1700 need any help with video decoding? It should be fast enough by far to decode any contemporary video even in 4k resolution... and since it's not a laptop, power consumption should not be an issue.

[Brisse]

bug was actually CPU-induced instability. I swapped out my Ryzen R7 1700 for a R7 2700 this year, and immediately went from having hard-locks on my machine every week or so to the machine surviving multiple weeks at a time

Let me guess. It locked up when CPU was idling? This seems to be an issue with first gen Ryzen and can be worked around by finding the following setting in BIOS and setting it to 'typical idle current'

 
 Advanced > AMD CBS > Zen Common Options > Power Supply Idle Control

[Veerappan]

Regarding amdgpu stability: I've seen definite improvements over the last few years there. I also realize at one point that what I was blaming on an amdgpu kernel driver bug was actually CPU-induced instability. I swapped out my Ryzen R7 1700 for a R7 2700 this year, and immediately went from having hard-locks on my machine every week or so to the machine surviving multiple weeks at a time (before I inevitably reboot for a kernel upgrade or something).

My RX 580 at this point is working exactly as I'd desire.

Which leads me to my top wishlist item: Video Decode acceleration in Firefox on Linux, ideally in a wayland session.

[Brisse]

dwagner Sorry to hear that. Personally I'm quite happy with amdgpu and a Fiji GPU, but I will admit I've had some minor issues. Currently it's Vulkan being borked on Wayland sessions, but that's an xserver 1.20 issue, and video hardware acceleration with gstreamer has been pretty terrible, especially on Wayland, but I'm not sure if AMD is to blame or if it's some other component. It's working fine with mpv and ffmpeg.

[dwagner]

Fiji, Polaris and Vega. That's where most of the development effort has gone into.

Lots of effort, yes, but with rather unsatisfactory results. My experience with a Polaris GPU is very much the same as sany8925's - amdgpu is unstable, and stability has not improved for about 18 months now, but rather deteriorated. It's a tragedy. And no, it is not just 3rd-party GPU vendors causing trouble - if you look into the bug-tracker, you'll find that as of today, even APUs like the 2500U completely fail to display anything upon booting with the most recent kernels. And it's not like there is a ton of different chip-sets out there hosting AMD APUs.

[pgoetz]

Lol 2019 and Linux users still have basic functionality stuff on the wishlist.

What are you referring to?

[cybertraveler]

Read trough that and they do come to the conclusion that it's not universal and thus it's either related to a hardware defect or AIB partner changes to boards/firmware the Windows drivers can handle (similar to the at-launch issues with the RX 590). Additionally, the 390 is a 2nd gen GCN card (it's a re-bade of the R9 290 from 2013) and IIRC AMDGPU officially supports only 3rd gen or newer.

It's probably not a hardware defect because they said that the card did work fine on GNU/Linux at one point with a particular driver version and it does work fine on Windows.

I'm a fan of AMD, but sandy raises important points. We should listen to this stuff. The user experience matters. I want to be able to recommend AMD to all new GNU/Linux users. If support for hardware is hit-and-miss I can't so easily do that.

My main GNU/Linux systems are currently using Intel graphics. They work fantastically. I really hope AMD can reach the same standard as Intel (if they haven't already).