Linux 5.5-rc6 Released With Some Notable Radeon Graphics Fixes Plus Other Random Work

[khnazile]

What's the bug you're facing? Crashes and resets?

Kernel driver faults. Computer becomes unresponsive. Sometimes amdgpu manages to reset itself, but context of all graphics applications including your desktop is lost and they're effectively dead. There are multiple reports of this on Bugzilla/Gitlab.

[BS86]

I have a very strange problem with the 5.5 Kernels so far: 8 out of 10 times when I reboot or shutdown, the system clock is reset to 1.1.2017 00:00 in BIOS.
That behaviour does not happen on Kernels 5.4.10 and earlier, and it also does not happen on Windows.

Things already done:
- Replaced mainboard battery (as it happens only with Kernel 5.5, that obviously did not fix it - but I realized that my mainboard only resets the time and date when removing the battery)
- checked for BIOS updates (none there: 5406 is installed and the latest version)
- linux-firmware is also up-to date (20200107 on Manjaro)

My relevant hardware: Asus ROG Strix X470-F Gaming and a Ryzen 2700X, full UEFI/GPT setup.

I only noticed that behaviour because on every boot after the clock reset happening, systemd-fsck kicks in for all partitions and that displays a message during boot for my rotation harddisk and slows down booting (the trigger for the fsck is the system time being earlier than the last mount time). If it would be a SSD only system, I would not even notice the behaviour because the NTP service already synced when the GUI displays the clock. The only way to see it is by checking the BIOS clock.

Does anyone else notice that behavior or can check if their hardware clock in BIOS is reset after rebooting with a 5.5 Kernel?

Edit: If it is important: Asus uses American Megatrends BIOS'es.

Finally fixing APUs is a big step forward indeed, but what about instability of discrete Vega hardware? It only works fine as long as you use it for web surfing, but that's not a typical use-case people would want powerful GPU for.

What's the bug you're facing? Crashes and resets?

[Cattus_D]

It's not stable at all. Check gitlab. Recoverable (sort of, you have to restart entire X11 session) GPU hangs with OpenGL apps and rare unrecoverable hangs with Vulkan apps. Both Vega10 and Vega20 affected. No workaround known.

What works on my machine (Vega 56 GPU) is lowering the power limit by 15-25 watts. At -15 watts, the performance on The Witcher 3 (using DXVK) appears to be equivalent to what it would be without the reduction. If I enable HBAO+, though, the game will still eventually crash.

[finalzone]

Lets hope someone review amd-sfh-driver and get it for Linus to make it mainline.

[khnazile]

What do you mean by fixing discrete Vega? In my experience it always was very stable.

It's not stable at all. Check gitlab. Recoverable (sort of, you have to restart entire X11 session) GPU hangs with OpenGL apps and rare unrecoverable hangs with Vulkan apps. Both Vega10 and Vega20 affected. No workaround known.

[R41N3R]

Finally fixing APUs is a big step forward indeed, but what about instability of discrete Vega hardware? It only works fine as long as you use it for web surfing, but that's not a typical use-case people would want powerful GPU for.

What do you mean by fixing discrete Vega? In my experience it always was very stable.

[khnazile]

Finally fixing APUs is a big step forward indeed, but what about instability of discrete Vega hardware? It only works fine as long as you use it for web surfing, but that's not a typical use-case people would want powerful GPU for.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 5.5-rc6 Released With Some Notable Radeon Graphics Fixes Plus Other Random Work

Linus Torvalds has just issued Linux 5.5-rc6 as the latest test release ahead of the stable Linux 5.5 kernel due out in a few weeks...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.5-rc6-Released