Raven Ridge won't be supported until Linux Kernel 4.15 (until Jan 2018)

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ryzen-Mobile-Today

This doesn’t sound like good news for those looking to run Raven Ridge on Linux, since Raven Ridge laptops are said to be coming out in November, and here I thought AMD was late with Raven Ridge (technically they are not). And is Kernel 4.14 even out yet?

Of course I would be lying if I said I knew much of anything about how kernels work and how they are written but wouldn’t this simply mean that it will take a while longer before any major bugs that could occur get ironed out?

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Taking guesses here:
Due to AMDs infinity fabric stuff beeing new in the CPU to GPU communications, the software has to be fitted to work. As that is unknown territory, it will take an unknown ammount of effort.

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The CPU will work fine. AMD has had problems getting their new display driver code accepted. Raven Ridge uses Vega graphics, which require a lot of kernel changes and upstream wasn’t willing to accept the code due to quality issues and abstraction layers.

This is no different from the discrete Vega cards though. The proprietary driver has had support for some time now and unofficial, patched kernels exist. I think @noenken is running Vega under Linux?

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Bleeding edge hardware, bleeding edge problems.

Just wait a year after release and all of these day1 issues are gone.

I’m not concerned by this news. Remember that Ryzen and Vega had issues at launch as well. At some point, we’re going to see people shipping AMD hardware with Linux, but this is an entirely new architecture, it needs time.

Due to the fact that it’s not been accepted into Linux due to quality issues and that the Windows code is closed source, just imagine the spaghetti code they’re using over there.

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I think OP missunderstood.

The final 4.14 kernel should be released in 2 weeks. I think that they are on rc3 right now.

4.15 is not planned for release until February.

Raven Ridge will work on 4.13 but you will need to use amdgpupro for 3d hardware support. Without this, you will fall back to VESA framebuffer mode and LLVMPipe for 3D (which runs on the CPU).

If you really want to run the fully open stack, you can run the AMD Staging branch which was rebased on 4.12 but has been ported to 4.13 as well but still experimental.

So don’t panic. If you are not up for the challenge, then avoid being one of first and pick one up in January or February.

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A year after release is late 2018, I don’t think I can hold my breath that long although I could hold it until Q2 2018.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_kaveri_ulinux&num=1

As long as it is better then Kavari back in 2014, that was a nightmare :slight_smile:

I blame fglrx.

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I remember trying to follow the directions on the AMD website for fglrx. It went badly :slight_smile:

I just feel 2018 will be allot better for Linux on raven ridge.
Being an APU fan ain’t easy :slight_smile:

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Raven ridge is supported in 4.13 according to what I have been seeing in the logs, 4.14 includes VEGA and is the next LTS kernel.

Tried 4.14.r5 a month back and system locked up in less than 10 seconds
Tried Kernel 4.14.r1023 last week and system ran “ok” but was choppy and CPU usage was about 2x what kernel 4.13 has been.

I think this is because until 4.15 for Raven Ridge, the CPU actually handles some of the graphical tasks rather than the GPU like it should.