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Comment by iknowverylittle | Hacker News Reader

So, what's AMD doing these days?

I'm hesitant to switch to AMD since Intel internal graphics play nicely with Linux. However that kind of doesn't matter if my machine isn't mine.

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For what it's worth and graphics on Linux are working great with amdgpu. Their efforts to develop and support open source mainline graphics has really finally paid off. Support is usually mainlined before hardware release now. I don't think "just works" integrated graphics are an issue for either company (Intel/AMD) in general on the Linux front.

That said the amdgpu driver is still relatively new and major changes and improvements are still ongoing but overall it's definitely production stable and for dedicated gpus performance is generally very good.

Not trying to sound like a fanboy it's just nice to see someone else push as hard for open source mainlined graphics as Intel has for all these years.

Except for those that happen to own an older card that used to work perfectly fine on the former AMD driver.

Case in point, the ATI Radeon HD 6310 that came on EEE PC models, the video hardware acceleration no longer works as it used to be.

Sure, I can probably hack the older driver into newer Ubuntu releases or track down someone that has already done it, but that is exactly what I don't want to spend my time doing outside work.

FWIW, it’s a completely different architecture. GCN has support all the way down to 1.0. The graphics card in your EEE PC is upgradable, if you’re feeling adventurous[1].

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Asus+Eee+PC+1008ha+Graphics+Car...

I know, and this kind of attitude regarding drivers is what as graphics oriented person, eventually pushed me back into the Windows/OS X world.

The graphics card was working perfectly fine before they decided to reboot driver support.

Now with the legacy driver I have to force enable acceleration and even then I sometimes get the feeling it isn't really working, given how the fan behaves when watching movies on the go.

> Now with the legacy driver I have to force enable acceleration and even then I sometimes get the feeling it isn't really working, given how the fan behaves when watching movies on the go.

If you want zero-copy video playback for optimizing battery life use mpv with --hwdec=vaapi. Or vdpau or whatever API is supported with that driver. You can also try switching -vo to vdpau/vaapi from OpenGL.

> I know, and this kind of attitude regarding drivers is what as graphics oriented person, eventually pushed me back into the Windows/OS X world.

On Windows you get legacy drivers for older architectures as well. Also the case with NVIDIA. It’s legacy hardware, after all… AMD’s new driver is completely open source, but it targets GCN, which is a completely different type of hardware.

Thanks for the hints, already tried them.

The issue is that AMD's legacy driver is not the same code as the driver it replaced.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/ubuntu-drops-amd-catalys...

On Windows and OS X, the legacy drivers keep working.

Nvidia has historically supported new drivers/Xorg for old hardware for aprox 10 years whereas amd/ati cards still available at retail have been unsupported in as little as 3 years time leaving you with open source drivers as your only other option if you want to install a new version of your distro with your older hardware.

The fact that they are open source is of course a good thing whats not is that they were at one time less than half the performance.

The new drivers from AMD gpus are both open source AND performant.

Basically the proper strategy 2003-2017 was to buy nvidia and install the binary drivers.

At present you can go with either so long as you aren't buying hardware too old to be supported by the new amd drivers. I'm still using nvidia on all my hardware but maybe I will give amd a try again next time around.

It sucks that its complicated but its not as complicated as it seems.

I know Linux since Slackware 2.0, so I am quite used to these issues regarding graphics cards, including the fun days of manually writing my own xorg.conf file.

Eventually one gets fed up and wants the laptop just to work.

Tried buying ones that come with linux? Alternatively stuff known to work well with linux like thinkpads?

This laptop came with Linux that was the point of buying in first place.

Asus used to sell their netbooks with Ubuntu pre-installed on the German Amazon store.

It already had a phase where I couldn't use WiFi for a couple of months as Ubuntu decided to replace the binary driver for an open source implementation partially working, and then fix issues as they came.

Now it is the same story regarding ATI drivers.

I remember those times as well, but my recent experiences with new hardware on Linux have been rather positive.

As long as you avoid hostile vendors like Realtek and NVIDIA everything should just work.

AMD has the PSP which basically is the same thing. But we don't know for sure what either one does.

One thing the PSP doesn't have is AMT style remote management.

AMD has their own kind of management system available on some machines (DASH, using "smart" NICs like Broadcom), but the PSP isn't even involved when DASH is available and in use, as far as I know.

However, on my Intel machine with AMT, there's a network port opened by the ME itself (TCP/16992). It can use the same IP as the main OS, or a different IP entirely if desired. It uses the same ethernet port as the main OS though, splitting the packets that are directed to one of the ME ports and selectively allowing the rest to continue to the main OS (there's a low-level ME firewall[1]).

On that port, there is a full remote desktop with mouse and keyboard, the ability to remotely connect small drives and/or ISO files, a remote serial console, a low level firewall configuration utility, and power/reboot controls. Even on machines where AMT is not even supposed to be available, there have been PoC demonstrated using one of the ME flaws to turn it back on[2].

[1] https://i.imgur.com/Wphopk1.jpg

(slide 68) [2] https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-17/materials/eu-17-Goryachy...

You know the shame of ME is that the concept and intended use isn't terrible and the engineering behind it is rather cool. It is however unfortunate how poorly Intel implemented it and essentially forced it onto personal systems that have no need for it to begin with.

It just should not be there unless requested by the customer. Period.

I have Ryzen 2400G which has Vega 11 internal graphics. GPU is supported only by the latest versions of graphic stack (kernel 4.17+, Mesa 18) and the only problem I have is that in Debian testing the kernel flag to enable the support of that GPU family is off, so I had to compile it myself (which could be false atm because I was away for a month and hadn't checked the updates).

I have recently built a machine with Ryzen 2700X & geforce gtx 1050ti (GPU is required as Ryzen doesn't have an internal one but there are plenty of cheaper ones like mine), running Ubuntu and it's just fantastic. Docker builds, compilation takes seconds as compared to my macbook which has i7. Plus there's no overheating issues when I am running Kubernetes all the time and I can still code.

TL;DR Ryzen 2700X is great value for money, would recommend it any day :)

+1 to this. Upgraded from an i7-4790 (non K variant)

System runs cooler, quieter and faster. Gentoo absolutely flies on it as well

I've been running on a Ryzen 5 1600 for a year and agree with you entirely, the performance is amazing for the price. Currently dual booting with Win10 and Void Linux and haven't had any processor-related issues so far!

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