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AMD Confirms Linux 'Performance Marginality Problem' On Ryzen (phoronix.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the isolated-problems dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Ryzen customers experiencing segmentation faults under Linux when firing off many compilation processes have now had their problem officially acknowledged by AMD. The company describes it as a "performance marginality problem" affecting some Ryzen customers and only on Linux. AMD confirmed Threadripper and Epyc processors are unaffected; they will be dealing with the issue on a customer-by-customer basis, and their future consumer products will see better Linux testing/validation. Ryzen customers believed to be affected by the problem can contact AMD Customer Care. Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: "With the Ryzen segmentation faults on Linux they are found to occur with many, parallel compilation workloads in particular -- certainly not the workloads most Linux users will be firing off on a frequent basis unless intentionally running scripts like ryzen-test/kill-ryzen. As I've previously written, my Ryzen Linux boxes have been working out great except in cases of intentional torture testing with these heavy parallel compilation tasks. [AMD's] analysis has also found that these Ryzen segmentation faults aren't isolated to a particular motherboard vendor or the like, contrary to rumors/noise online due to the complexity of the problem."

4 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. oblig by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    certainly not the workloads most Linux users will be firing off on a frequent basis

    I run Gentoo you insensitive clod!

  2. Re:Phoronix FAIL by 0123456 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Not to mention that one of the reasons we want more cores in our desktop machines is to speed up C++ compiles by compiling more files in parallel.

  3. So far so good by I'm+just+joshin · · Score: 4, Informative

    Anecdote here...

    Ryzen 1700 w/ 64GB running Promox and 6 virtual machines - 1 Debian, 1 Gentoo (build machine), 1 PF Sense, and 3 Windows.

    Been rock solid doing full world builds on Gentoo, PCI passthrough of a GTX 1070 card to one of the Windows VMs (gaming actually works well), and has only been rebooted once since getting it going. Uptime of 24 days.

    No segfaults,

    It is amazingly fast & quiet. Quite the upgrade from my I7-3770K.

  4. Re:These are a bear to track down by Misagon · · Score: 4, Informative

    It has been confirmed to be a processor bug, not a software bug.
    BSD kernel developer Matt Dillon sent AMD a reproducible test case back in April.
    You can read more about it here.

    --
    "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley