AMD this year not only delivered the powerful Ryzen 5000 “Zen 3” desktop processors and early Radeon RX 6000 “Big Navi” graphics cards, but for exciting Linux users it was timely open source support for the new GPUs well in advance (and also already getting ready for some 2021 graphics products), as well as more timely support around Zen 3 thermal support and other additions. AMD’s open source timing is still improving, although it is still not ideal, but it has been quite a year for AMD Linux users.
AMD’s hardware releases this year have been fantastic, with the Ryzen 5000 series continuing to impress on Linux with its great performance and the Radeon RX 6000 series also offering the best GPU performance for an open source driver to date. With enough new open source components, the new products sailed smoothly from day one – assuming you could purchase the hardware. But leaving room for improvement in the future is that they could be even more punctual in their work to activate the kernel to facilitate users, especially companies that want to keep the LTS kernel versions. There are also other issues, such as the Zen 3 compiler support patches that appear only after launch and so far without any updated cost table, scheduler model or other optimizations to really meet the updated processors. Intel still leads when it comes to having its open source compiler tool chain support and kernel support well before product launches, but AMD is on an improvement path.
Looking ahead to 2021, I am very excited for the next generation AND Ryzen mobile processors, next generation Threadripper and certainly for EPYC 7003 “Milan” … Stay tuned for benchmarks on both when the time comes. In addition to many other interesting Zen 3 and RDNA 2 benchmarks still coming with the evolving open source / Linux state.
The most viewed AMD open source / Linux news articles for 2020 on Phoronix included:
Linus Torvalds switches to AMD Ryzen Threadripper after 15 years of Intel systems
An interesting anecdote shared in today’s announcement of Linux 5.7-rc7 is that the creator of Linux and Git Linus Torvalds swapped their core equipment for an AMD Ryzen Threadripper.
The AMD Radeon graphics driver represents approximately 10.5% of the Linux kernel
Given the imminent release of Linux 5.9, I was having a little fun with the cloc today, looking at the current lines of code count for this almost final Linux 5.9 kernel state.
Contributions from AMD vs. Intel for the Linux kernel in the last decade
Motivated by curiosity, here’s a look at how the total number of AMD and Intel developers contributed to the upstream Linux kernel during the 2010s, as well as the total number of commits each year from the respective hardware vendors.
Acer is launching in Germany what could be a great AMD Ryzen 5 4500U Linux laptop
For those looking for an AMD Linux laptop powered by a Ryzen 4000 series processor, Acer is ready to launch a new laptop, at least in Germany, which can be quite attractive for Linux users.
I’m running AMD Ryzen 7 4700U + Ubuntu 20.04 as my main system
For about a month and a half, I have been using the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U as my primary laptop paired with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It has worked very well for not even being the top-of-the-line AMD Renoir SKU. Here are some additional comments for those thinking about one of the new AMD laptops using Linux.
Arch Linux Zen Kernel flavor benchmarks
Following recent Liquorix Linux kernel tests and other scheduler discussions (and more), some requests from premium supporters rolled over to see the performance of the Arch Linux Zen kernel package against the generic kernel. Here are the benchmark results.
A quick look at the performance of Blender 2.82 on Intel + AMD CPUs
With Blender 2.82 released on Friday, this weekend we started benchmarking this new Blender release as the leading open source 3D modeling solution currently available. Here are some preliminary numbers v2.81 vs. v2.82 on different Intel and AMD more advanced processors.
Ryzen CPUs on Linux finally see CCD temperatures, current + voltage report
One of the few frustrations with AMD Ryzen CPU support on Linux so far has gone beyond the often delayed support for CPU temperature reports, it was the mainline kernel not supporting voltage readings and other extra sensors. But that is finally changing with the “k10temp” driver being extended to include current and voltage reports in addition to CCD temperature reports on Zen 2 processors.
Rust-Written Redox OS initializing the 128-Thread AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X
The open source Redox OS operating system focused on the Rust language is now able to boot the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-core / 128-threading processor and work with full multi-threading capabilities.
ASUS TUF laptops with Ryzen are now fixed to prevent overheating on Linux
The experience of the AMD Ryzen Linux laptop continues to improve, although it is a little late in some elements of support. In addition to the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub driver finally being released and current / voltage reports for Zen CPUs on Linux, another step forward in Ryzen mobile support is a fix for ASUS TUF laptops with these processors.
LLVM / Clang 10.0 adds AMD Zen 2 Scheduler model for optimized code generation
It’s a shame that it took so many months after Ryzen and EPYC processors based on AMD Zen 2 started shipping to see this compiler support in place, but the good news now is that for the next release of LLVM 10.0 it is now the Zen 2 scheduler model being added to target “znver2”.
AMD starts providing PowerPC versions of its “AOMP” GPU compiler
AOMP is the AMD GPU compiler to support OpenMP and HIP on GPUs as part of Radeon Open eCosystem 3.0 (ROCm 3.0). Now they have started providing 64-bit PowerPC LE builds of AOMP as part of allowing GPU Radeon computing to happen on POWER9 systems.
A large number of ACO optimizations for the Radeon Vulkan driver landed on Mesa 20.0
The backend of the ACO compiler supported by Valve which is optionally used by the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver has continued to grow in popularity among Linux players and has also continued to mature a lot for the Mesa 20.0 which will be released later this quarter.
RenderDoc 1.6 released, NVIDIA + AMD + Intel all ready for Vulkan 1.2
This morning’s release of Vulkan 1.2 got off to a great start.
Mesa 20.0 released with major improvements for Intel, AMD Radeon Vulkan / OpenGL
Mesa 20.0 was released as the first quarter 2020 update for the Mesa 3D open source graphics driver stack.
AMD Ryzen 4000 Mobile Series “Renoir” graphics card that is no longer experimental with Linux 5.5
While the Linux 5.5 kernel is due out this Sunday, a last-minute change to the AMDGPU DRM driver means that Renoir graphics are no longer treated as experimental. With that, there is open source support ready to use, instead of being hidden behind a kernel module flag.
System76 can offer AMD Ryzen laptops when they start their own manufacturing
System76 is getting ready to start shipping its new Lemur Pro laptop in early April. This will be their most open laptop, although still based on Intel. But it seems that when they follow through on their ambitious plans to start making their own devices, we may finally see a System76 laptop with AMD technology.
FFmpeg 4.3 released with AMD AMF encoding, Vulkan support, AV1 encoding
FFmpeg 4.3 is the latest version of this open source multimedia library. FFmpeg 4.3 is a major release.
AMD is hiring another leading Linux kernel developer to work on its graphics driver
If you have experience in upstream development of the Linux kernel, AMD is hiring a leading Linux kernel developer.
Updated Linux k10temp driver for AMD CPUs to better handle power / temperature analysis
As we have been looking forward to last week, the Linux kernel driver k10temp has been updated for better AMD CPU CCD temperatures and voltage / current reports. These improvements are evolving rapidly thanks to the work of the open source community with AMD still holding data sheets on well-kept energy / temperature records. A new version of k10temp was sent on Wednesday.