Third-gen Ryzen Support

arkhenius

Hi folks,
I read the Phoronix article and saw that there were boot issues on any distro they tested on other than Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I was wondering if any fellow Solus user tried the third gen Ryzen processors yet. I am planning on getting one, and ideally I would get it after I know it works well with Solus 🙂

Harvey

I don't know if you're the same person who asked on reddit, so I'll copy paste what I said in reply here as I think its worth waiting a bit longer for information regardless of if anyone has tested solus on it or not:

I've confirmed with AMD they do have an open issue surrounding "5.0.9" (the stock kernel of Ubuntu 19.04)
...
Complicating this issue further is that when trying Linux 5.0/5.1/5.2 kernels on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, they all booted up fine!

Solus 4 ISO ships with kernel 4.20.16. Once you update you'll be on 5.1.14. I don't know when zen2 support was added to the kernel an there simply isn't enough information on the issue yet to know exactly what is going on. If you're concerned hold off a few weeks to a month.

I plan on waiting at least a week or two, to see if there are any X570 motherboards to steer clear of when paired with a 3900X or are just poor in general. It just doesn't pay to be an early adopter. I've been waiting 7 months with money in my account ready to go for zen2 launch, I feel your pain. I think it worth holding off just a bit longer for.

arkhenius

@Harvey
I saw that too I believe, but I'm not that person 🙂
I will definitely wait, and I have been reading up on the discussions online around what is the root cause (kernel, firmware, systemd, all of the above, etc.). Just wanted to post the discussion here so if anyone tried, their experiences will be collected to easily review for anyone who is interested. Any maybe the team members can chip in if they ever hear about the support (when it is added/solved) themselves.

Harvey

arkhenius
Yeah absolutely, I'm eager to hear from people testing too. I just want to make sure people who haven't pulled the trigger on a new system yet, think about the downsides of being an early adopter before buying into a new platform they're going to be stuck with for some time.

Justin

Eager for someone to send me a Ryzen 5 3600 and motherboard to test! 😛

[deleted]

Justin body paint stream incoming? lol

fishyman65712

Justin - - haha yeah I'll get right on that ......... what is it they say Christmas in July or some such thing.

Justin

[deleted] Aint nobody want to see that! 😃

Soopyyy

Someone on reddit mentioned that rolling back the systemD version fixed the issue for them?

arkhenius

There may be a small update: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ryzen-3K-RdRand-Systemd-Maybe
It may have been a systemd issue which may have been fixed via a patch on May. However, apparently there was no systemd release since April, which is why this issue persists currently on rolling release/newer distros.
I know, lots of "may be"s. We still need to wait 🙂 But just wanted to provide the update for those that are interested. I wonder if it's possible to apply the mentioned patch and test it out on Solus. I am planning on getting one of the CPUs later this week regardless, and am willing to test it if need be.

Harvey

Gotta love that commit message:

An ugly, ugly work-around for #11810. And no, we shouldn't have to do
this. This is something for AMD, the firmware or the kernel to
fix/work-around, not us. But nonetheless, this should do it for now.

EDIT: Source: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/12536/commits/1c53d4a070edbec8ad2d384ba0014d0eb6bae077

JoshStrobl

Harvey That doesn't affect us since we're still on 239. Issue is present in 240+ apparently.

Soopyyy

I've been doing some reading and have seen it mentioned that the issue is with SystemD version 243 and greater. It seems that my current stable version of solus is on SystemD 233. I am getting a 3700x on Thursday so I will let you guys know if it works!

Soopyyy

JoshStrobl
Hopefully I can build my system and install Solus straight away then. I will be very keen to see what its like running from an NVME ssd paired with the 3700x. On my I3 laptop + NVME ssd its already very fast to boot.

arkhenius

@JoshStrobl Oh that's good to know! I will try to test it out as soon as I get mine as well then 🙂

Lucien_Lachance

looking forward to your reports guys, ill be getting mine in a few weeks or maybe months

Soopyyy

All going well, my parts should arrive tomorrow afternoon. They shipped today, so fingers crossed.

Soopyyy

Hi guys, I can confirm that the 3700x does in fact work with Solus 4.0. I am using it type this post.

Lucien_Lachance

Phoronix @phoronix
#AMD Releases @AMDRyzen BIOS Fix To Motherboard Partners For Booting Newer #Linux Distributions!
https://t.co/VcKUeQ0SDk

arkhenius

I should update that a 3900X works out of the box with no issue! 🙂 Even boosts and voltage regulates properly, compared to Windows where I am seeing lots of people on Reddit having issues getting them to boost; advantages of the kernel I guess 🙂

Soopyyy

arkhenius Yeah I've done some back to back testing with Solus and Windows. For a starter, my idle temps on Solus are 20c cooler, 28c vs 48c in windows. This seems to be because the CPU is being boosted to 4.5ghz/1.5v every two or three seconds while in Windows and in Solus it only boosts when I perform an action that requires it to actually do something. So far its rock solid stable on Solus as well, I get better FPS in games than I do on windows even through proton. I can only put this down to less resource overhead in Solus mitigating the difference between a native and emulated game.