Trying Out AMD's Ryzen Threadripper On TrueOS, DragonFlyBSD

Following the AMD Threadripper Linux tests of this week today I finally had a chance to try out some of the BSDs with this 16 core / 32 thread system.

With the AMD Threadripper 1950X with Gigabyte X399 AORUS Gaming 7 is how I was running these tests. Initial targets were with TrueOS (formerly known as PC-BSD, the desktop-oriented branch of FreeBSD) and DragonFlyBSD.

With the TrueOS release I was using the current stable version that is tracking 12.0-CURRENT. TrueOS/FreeBSD worked out fine on this system with the exception of the integrated networking on the Gigabyte X399 AORUS Gaming 7. But plugging in a USB Ethernet adapter worked out fine, so the testing continued. Here are some reference numbers via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file:




With DragonFlyBSD 4.8.1 and the latest daily image, things were a bit more hairy. When first trying to boot from the USB image, the file-system would end up not being detected as if the USB device disappeared. That happened with both the latest stable and development images.

I next tried a USB DVD drive and installing via that means... That was working out fine, but through the install process just hung. I gave it a couple hours and no progress. It was basically stalled half-way through the install process with no clear indication why.

I haven't encountered either of these DragonFly issues on other systems. I'll give DragonFly a go on Threadripper when the next stable release of this BSD is out in the next month it's expected.

So the Threadripper/Ryzen CPUs may be working fine, but the chipset/motherboard compatibility may be a bit more iffy right now for the BSDs. That's the quick trial of DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD/TrueOS on Threadripper. More extensive testing as soon as time allows.