AMD News Archives

After last week sharing some Intel Tiger Lake benchmarks on Linux 5.10, the tables have turned and here are some similar tests when running Linux 5.10 on an AMD Ryzen 4000 series "Renoir" notebook.

In addition to the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub (SFH) driver coming with Linux 5.11 for improving Ryzen laptop support, the AMD SoC PMC driver is also under review for landing in this next kernel release.

Not only are AMD Ryzen 5000 series completely dominating in performance but they could soon see open-source Coreboot support as an alternative to the proprietary firmware/BIOS. Project X is an interesting effort around blob-free Coreboot/Oreboot support on AMD Zen.

Landing in Mesa 20.3 during this final week of feature development is support in RadeonSI Gallium3D for EGL_EXT_protected_surface. This long-standing EGL extension allows surfaces/windows to beset as protected and in which case the contents are only accessible to secure accesses. Outside/insecure accesses to the window (surface) contents are blocked.

Following the rumors earlier this month that AMD was in talks to acquire Xilinx, a deal has been announced this morning.

While AMD has landed Znver3 support in GNU Binutils, the company hasn't yet sent out patches for either the GCC or LLVM/Clang compilers in setting up the Zen 3 target with its new instructions or optimized scheduling model / cost table. But a basic implementation has been merged to LLVM for allowing "-march=znver3" based on the limited public details thus far.

For the Intel Tiger Lake Linux benchmarking thus far with the Core i7 1165G7 on the Dell XPS 13 9310 it's primarily been compared against the Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U on the AMD side since those are the only Renoir units within my possession. But a Phoronix reader recently provided me with remote access to his Lenovo ThinkPad X13 with Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U (8 cores / 16 threads) for seeing how the Tiger Lake performance compares against that higher-end SKU.

Since 2012 there has been a quirk in the Linux kernel to disable/override using ACPI _PSD data on all AMD processors as a workaround in turn for Windows-specific behavior that clashes with the semantics of the Linux ACPI CPUFreq driver for CPU frequency scaling. With AMD Zen 3 this quirk is no longer needed to behave correctly and thus Linux 5.10 is going to drop this eight year old quirk on Zen 3 and newer.

It was sadly too late for squeezing into the current Linux 5.10 merge window but it looks like for Linux 5.11 in early 2021 the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub "SFH" driver will make its long awaited debut.

One of AMD's compiler experts this week sent out a patch wiring up Zen 3 support in the important GNU Binutils collection for Linux systems.

In addition to Linux 5.10 supporting SEV-ES as the "encrypted state" for AMD EPYC's Secure Encrypted Virtualization, this kernel is also adding Secure Nested Paging (SNP) support to the AMD IOMMU driver as part of their next-generation SEV-SNP security.

While the mainline Linux kernel for quite a while now has supported AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization for EPYC processors as a means of better securing guest virtual machines (VMs) and public clouds with hardware memory encryption and using one key per VM to not only protect between guests but also the hypervisor, with Linux 5.10 comes AMD SEV-ES as another step forward for secure virtualization on AMD EPYC.

It was in January that AMD finally published an open-source Linux driver for their Sensor Fusion Hub used by AMD Ryzen laptops for various sensor functionality. As we approach the end of the year this driver still hasn't been mainlined yet but a new revision was sent out on Friday.

While AMD is providing great pressure against Intel in the CPU space, it looks like AMD could be soon going up against them in the FPGA space too.

Today perhaps will be the most interesting day since the start of the pandemic... It's finally the day where AMD Zen 3 desktop CPUs are expected to be revealed in just about one hour's time! Stay tuned, but before that virtual event, here is a word on the Linux prospects and support for these upcoming AMD CPUs.

Patches from a Google engineer allow run-time average power limiting (RAPL) support for AMD Zen processors within the Linux PowerCap driver.

AMD has been sending out a lot of new Linux graphics driver enablement code recently for the Linux with the newest being the "Green Sardine" platform.

AMD today announced the Ryzen 3000 and Athlon 3000 C-Series processors for use in Google Chromebooks from multiple vendors.

The next version of the Linux kernel will allow monitoring temperatures of the upcoming AMD Zen 3 processors.

Linux 5.10 is set to support a new feature of AMD Secure Memory Encryption (SME) as part of the Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV).

It's been widely expected AMD will launch their next-generation RDNA 2 graphics cards and Zen 3 processors in Q4 as they previously reported as well as leaks pointing to October reveal dates. Today the company is sharing actual dates for said announcements.

In preparation for "future AMD systems", which is likely AMD EPYC Zen 3 "Milan" server processors, there will be more banks for the Machine Check Exception handling.

Last month the German Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers launched the PULSE 15 with AMD Ryzen "Renoir" processors. Today they launched a new model also featuring the very popular AMD Renoir parts.

The PCI subsystem updates have been sent in for the Linux 5.9 kernel. Peer-to-peer DMA support is now solid for all AMD CPUs of the Zen family or newer.

While a lot of interesting changes are coming for the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel, sadly a long overdue change isn't going to make the merge window and that is the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub driver.

There didn't appear to be much usage ever out of the AMD HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) support within the GCC compiler and hadn't been maintained in a while so now has been wiped out of the GNU Compiler Collection.

Building off the work sent out by Google engineers in recent months and merged for Linux 5.8 around RAPL support for AMD Zen / Zen 2 CPUs with supporting the "runtime average power limiting" counters on Linux similar to Intel's longstanding support, that work has continued now with Zen RAPL support in the PowerCap driver.

The KDE Slimbook is getting a big upgrade in the form of the ProX and ProX 15 that are powered by AMD's Ryzen 7 4800H "Renoir" processor for offering much better performance and all-around better specs.

AMD today officially revealed their Renoir-based Ryzen 4000 APUs. Unfortunately though for enthusiasts, at least for now these APUs are just available for pre-built systems and OEMs.

Back in May the folks at TUXEDO Computers in Germany launched their first AMD Linux laptop. That device though was a letdown in being based on a previous-generation AMD Ryzen 3000 series mobile processor rather than the far better Ryzen 4000 "Renoir" processors. Fortunately, today they announced the Pulse 15 laptop that comes in Ryzen 5 4600H and Ryzen 7 4800H processor options.

For about one and a half months now I have been using the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U as my main laptop paired with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It's been working out very well for not even being the top-of-the-line AMD Renoir SKU. Here is some additional commentary for those thinking about one of the new AMD laptops with Linux use.

For those thinking of picking up one of the new AMD Ryzen 3000XT series processors and weighing whether it's worthwhile on your budget picking up DDR4-3600 memory or other higher frequency DDR4 modules, here are some fresh benchmark results with the Ryzen 9 3900XT looking at 100 different tests on Linux and showing how the performance changes from DDR4-2133 through DDR4-3800.

Over the weekend I began running some benchmarks of the Linux 5.8 development kernel on the Lenovo Flex 5 laptop with Ryzen 5 4500U. One of the standouts so far for from this Linux 5.8 testing compared to the stable 5.6/5.7 kernel series is better Radeon graphics performance with the Renoir laptop.

AMD has made public "SMM Callout Privilege Escalation" or more formally CVE-2020-12890 as an AGESA vulnerability that could lead to arbitrary code execution on APUs.

After weeks of rumors, AMD today officially confirmed the existence of the Ryzen 3000XT series.

Linux kernel developer Thomas Gleixner sent in the RAS/core changes on Friday night for the Linux 5.8 kernel merge window that is wrapping up this weekend.

The latest Linux kernel patch work we are seeing out of AMD in preparations for Zen 3 processors coming later this year is INVPCID instruction support for KVM virtualization guests.

AMD has shared with us that they have published a video to explain in basic terms for the audience at large "What is ROCm?", a.k.a. the Radeon Open eCosystem stack.

Linux enthusiasts have long been after System76 to offer an AMD Ryzen powered laptop and today they announced such in the form of the new Serval WS.

Complementing the new AMD Energy Driver in the hwmon subsystem for Linux 5.8 to provide per-socket/core reporting, the Linux perf subsystem in this new kernel version has run-time average power limiting (RAPL) framework integration for AMD Zen/Zen2 CPUs.

Hitting the mailing list just minutes ago were a set of more than 200 patches bringing up support for the previously unheard of Sienna Cichlid GPU.

Adding to the multiple new AMD drivers coming with Linux 5.8 is their new SPI controller driver.

Of the many features coming for Linux 5.8 one of the new drivers we are very much looking forward to is the AMD energy driver for finally exposing per-core and per-socket/package energy reporting of Zen/Zen2 CPUs under Linux. It's working out well so far in my evaluation.

Landing this weekend in hwmon-next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel cycle is the recently reported on "amd_energy" driver for supporting AMD Zen/Zen2 core and package energy sensors.

An interesting anecdote shared in today's Linux 5.7-rc7 announcement is word that Linux and Git creator Linus Torvalds switched his main rig over to an AMD Ryzen Threadripper.

For those AMD Ryzen laptop users eager to see the Sensor Fusion Hub driver for supporting the different hardware sensors on these AMD Zen laptops, that driver still isn't going to be merged for the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle even after the patches were first published months ago.

TUXEDO Computers has launched their first AMD-powered Linux laptop! The excitement quickly faded though when seeing it's not a Renoir design.

When it comes to the support for AMD Ryzen 4000 "Renoir" laptop support under Linux, as outlined in my testing so far this month the main caveat is needing Linux 5.6~5.7 for good graphics support but on the likes of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with Linux 5.4 you will not have GPU acceleration. At least in the case of the Lenovo IdeaPad 5 I have been using to test, you also need Linux 5.7 Git for battery sensor support. Another item that in turn is coming with Linux 5.8 is CPU temperature reporting for the Renoir processors.

One of the long sought after features for AMD Zen (and Zen 2) processors on Linux has been the ability to monitor the CPU package power consumption on Linux, similar to what's long been available for Intel CPUs on Linux and similarly for older AMD Bulldozer era CPUs with a power monitoring driver. Now on Friday evening a patch series was posted by a Google engineer to provide this long sought after functionality.

Wraith Master 1.0 has been released as the "feature complete" version of this Linux GUI application for providing RGB lighting controls for the AMD Wraith Prism heatsink under Linux.