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My biggest concern when considering AMD on Linux is drivers. I see in my feeds Phoronix is constantly reporting on updates to recent kernels. However, most of these power management, etc equivalent features have been available for years from Intel.

How are people finding AMD hardware in the real world wrt Linux on say 4.19 or 5.4 kernels?

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I run Ryzen on Linux 5.5 on my desktop workstation at home. Admittedly I am always running the latest kernel as long as I reboot often enough, but it has been good. I also use an AMD GPU, and that has been very nice. Intel probably still has an edge on supporting the Linux graphics stack but not by much, and AMD GPUs have a lot more muscle, so it’s not a bad trade off imo. Anything to avoid NVIDIA really.

(To those who love NVIDIA on Linux: I get it. However, Linux needs to move on from X11 and the old, broken, fragmented graphics driver “model.” NVIDIA will always be a second class citizen on Wayland until they change their tune regarding open source. But hey, maybe they’re OK with losing Linux and Mac users, and if that’s their position I’m perfectly happy losing them.)

Do AMD GPUs work well with ML drivers (CUDA and competitors)? Are higher-level drivers like PyTorch and TensorFlow compatible (and optimized, or else no point buying an expensive GPU to get only half-performance) with AMD backends?

It's far better today than it used to be, but it's still a work in progress. Over the past year or two, they've been doing a lot of hiring to bring ROCm HIP up to par as a CUDA competitor.

I wasn't exactly thrilled to see yet another GPU interface, but they seem to be trying to match the CUDA way of doing things. That ought to make supporting AMD much easier than it once was.

In general, no. The highest performance software only runs on Nvidia GPUs (or internal hardware, like Google’s TPUs).

I think this depends very much on what exactly you mean by "highest performance software". Some frameworks have upstreamed support for ROCm. A few of my colleagues have been doing some testing and mentioned to me they were reasonably impressed with performance on newer hardware.

My current impression is that AMD is not the best option for ML but is getting better over time. So YMMV. That said, I do not use my local machine for ML (and don’t do ML in any serious capacity.)

TensorFlow works with AMD's CUDA alternative named ROCm. You'd need to check installation instructions though.

Yes, ROCm is upstreamed into Tensorflow. On our Hopsworks platform, you can run the same TensorFlow code on either ROCm or Cuda. No code changes needed:

https://www.logicalclocks.com/blog/welcoming-amd-rocm-to-hop...

Performance ain't so bad on AMD GPUs anymore - and none of the EULA crap. Just buy a Vega R7 for 500 bucks and get 16 GB of memory and the performance of close to a 2080 Ti (for convnets, at least) - but with no data center restrictions:

https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/tensorflow-upstream/...

How about Pytorch?

You have to compile it yourself, which sucks. For some reason PyTorch aren't agreeing to upstream ROCm, yet.

You don't need to compile it, AMD provides docker images.

For example I was able to run fast.ai/pytorch oh my amd gpu https://github.com/briangorman/fastai_rocm_docker

> NVIDIA will always be a second class citizen on Wayland

More like Wayland will always be a second class citizen on machines with NVIDIA cards.

They are the only such graphics vendor, but sure. Either way NVIDIA users lose.

Or is it Wayland users that lose? On which side will the coin land? :)

The coin landed long enough that you can’t even see it under the dust. Xorg is effectively unmaintained aside from Xwayland. If you had hopes of Wayland disappearing, you can safely end them now.

I don't have hopes of that, I'm just waiting for the dust to eventually settle so we can just use it and stop waiting for it.

Do you know if Ubuntu 20.04 will be using it by default?

It's great. I've been using an EPYC 7401P as a primary workstation/build server for < 3 years, things have all been working great. I'm on Debian/testing, and I upgrade once a week or so.

I have a bunch of VMs on it, multiple-GPUs, and a bunch of disks. It does exactly what I want, and I'll be upgrading things next year or so.

Linux on ThreadRipper 1950 has run great since launch.

From the other side of the FOSS isle I can report that I have had zero issues under FreeBSD with: 1600X, 2700, Epyc 7002

FreeBSD & Linux both handle the Rx580 line of video cards without a problem. (including 4k@60Hz)

I am quite happy with my AMD Radeon RX 460 running Arch Linux with a 5.5.7 kernel. It has significantly more power than the embedded Intel GPU I have in the same system but doesn't require a fan either (the PC is completely fanless).

I've been running Arch Linux on my 3900X with no major issues. It took a couple of updates before the temperature sensing worked, but right now everything works perfectly.

The sad part is that AMD seemingly does not want temperature sensors to work on Linux. All progress on sensor support has been from the community (namely Guenter Roeck) using leaked information, and AMD has been plugging some of those leaks[1]. It's not clear to me why AMD does not add this support themselves, Intel has no problem adding temperature support so I don't think there's much to gain by trying to keep it a secret.

> Guenter Roeck: The information is available from AMD under NDA, which is why Windows tools like HwINFO support it. The added Linux support was largely possible due to what I am sure are unintentional leaks by AMD, mostly in AMD's Linux kernel graphics code. Unfortunately, they learned; the latest version of their graphics code include files no longer provides temperature sensor addresses for Zen2.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/processors-me...

Maybe it's Microsoft that doesn't want AMD to reveal the sensor addresses and it's AMD that wants to sell processors for the next Xbox ...

Why would Microsoft care? O-o

Right now I'm battling the rough edges around the RX 5500 XT support. If you try and use 3 monitors it reliably crashes. You can kind of make it work by manually setting monitors.xml to a low resolution on them or a low refresh rate before you add the third monitor, but that only seems to work if you add the monitor at runtime. I copied the same monitors.xml for gdm as well so no clue what during initialization seems to be crashing it only if it's during boot. I've tried all the way up to DRM-next, mesa-git, latest linux-firmware and so far I'm stuck with 2 out of 3 screens.

I've also got a new 3700X and that's been completely stable.

So this is obviously non-server:

If you use their integrated graphics (as on laptops, etc.) there are sometimes driver hiccups (for example, sometimes a feature that's discrete GPU specific will be problematic with the integrated graphics but enabled by default), or slowness to shut down.

Besides that, of the three Ryzen machines I use regularly they're all fine daily drivers, but sometimes have fixable boot/kernel configuration oddities that vary by kernel release.

Based on this, I'd stay away from 2000 series with integrated graphics, but otherwise am pretty comfortable with the platform.

My desktop with a ryzen is more stable than it was with my previous i5: no bootup / boot down systemD delays that take 2 minutes to time out. No issues with vagrant / virtual box either

Bought a 1600x a couple months after launch (along with an rx580). Other than temperature sensors everything worked beautifully out of the box with a standard ubuntu install. Since then my work has bought a 2990wx and multiple 3950x's all mostly without issues (wifi only works on newer kernels on some x570 motherboards, but an upgrade to ubuntu 19.10 fixes this).

I don't have any Epyc hardware, but Linux 5.0 and 5.3 have worked great with my Ryzen 3 1200 and Ryzen 7 3700X, using Ubuntu 18.04.

I have a 3900x that I have used with the latest ubuntu and now popos. No stability issues at all, performance is great.

Works fine for me. Only issue is that the Picasso video driver isn't in 4.19 shipping with Debian 10. Text mode works though, so it is easy to build and install the latest kernel.

Text mode works though, so it is easy to build and install the latest kernel.

No building necessary BTW, just use the 5.4 kernel from backports.

I am using a Thinkpad with a Ryzen 5 Pro 3500U. Has been completely trouble-free for me on 5.4+ and this is easily the best Linux laptop I have ever owned.

I have an Ryzen 9 3900x with an AMD GPU, I haven't manually installed any drivers and everything I use it for (web, compiling, videos), works.

I have a 3700x desktop and have no issues with it. I have a $200 AMD APU netbook and it's fine. Slow, but I got the performance I paid for.

On laptops the open source driver experience still fails short of the fxglr capabilities.

Not sure which kernel is in Ubuntu 18.04, but my 1300X has been nothing but rock steady.

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