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Linux 5.8 Bringing Some Performance Boosts For AMD Renoir Graphics

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  • Linux 5.8 Bringing Some Performance Boosts For AMD Renoir Graphics

    Phoronix: Linux 5.8 Bringing Some Performance Boosts For AMD Renoir Graphics

    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...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    I do think they should make an effort to fix the stability issues rather than squeezing minor performance improvement. Random crashes of amdgpu driver (several times a day) make the system barely usable.
    The bug exists from the first stable release of 5.7 to 5.8-rc2, and probably still in the rc3.
    Lucky or not, my laptop just crashed when I was writing this reply. It's the first time I've found the auto-save feature to be so useful.

    - My environment: Arch/KDE/Mesa-Git

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    • #3
      I agreed with southwood . The driver needs some stability work. I have the Ideapad 5 14" 14ARE05, and none of the sleep modes work properly. *If* it goes to sleep, amdgpu crashes during the resume, and I have a headless laptop. If I ssh to it, I can reboot it though.

      I've done some distro-hopping to see if I could find a good combination. Manjaro would hibernate at least, but would not resume. Fedora 32 (with 5.8rc) won't even suspend. Strangely enough, I also had some problems with Windows 10, so I think this may have more to do with the laptop/firmware. But, amdgpu shouldn't crash everytime.

      I really want to like this laptop, but if I can't use it like a laptop it has limited usefulness.

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      • #4
        https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/a...77#note_550775
        it most of the time works perfectly fine, but I found a way to trigger that bug (I think this is).
        Developers needs bug reports, posting on phoronix will not help.
        Sleep works fine for me. Zepherus G14

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        • #5
          Originally posted by rogowskys View Post
          I agreed with southwood . The driver needs some stability work. I have the Ideapad 5 14" 14ARE05, and none of the sleep modes work properly. *If* it goes to sleep, amdgpu crashes during the resume, and I have a headless laptop. If I ssh to it, I can reboot it though.

          I've done some distro-hopping to see if I could find a good combination. Manjaro would hibernate at least, but would not resume. Fedora 32 (with 5.8rc) won't even suspend. Strangely enough, I also had some problems with Windows 10, so I think this may have more to do with the laptop/firmware. But, amdgpu shouldn't crash everytime.

          I really want to like this laptop, but if I can't use it like a laptop it has limited usefulness.
          Well, that's weird. I have the Ideapad 5 15" 15ARE05 and I haven't experienced any issues on Windows. On GNU/Linux though (more precisely, on Arch and Fedora), I have had some issues, but they are all fixed now.

          First, the touchpad didn't work at all on Arch. Turns out I just had to blacklist the elants_i2c kernel module (though if you have a touchscreen, you should follow the steps described here). Also, the screen's brightness was buggy, but the patch for it has already been merged on upstream so that's not an issue anymore. I wish Chromium supported VP9 Profile 2 hardware decoding though (mpv does support it), so I can watch 4K Youtube videos effortlessly, as on Windows. That is the only concern I have on GNU/Linux.

          Sleeping works 100% of the time (and I heavily use it) and I haven't had any amdgpu crashes. Not even playing Minecraft on an external monitor, or doing silly things on SDL.

          I really suggest you to update your BIOS. Lenovo has released some updates that had fixed some minor concerns I had about fan speed, so they might have also fixed something in your model. I'm fairly happy with the computer now

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          • #6
            Originally posted by EvilHowl View Post
            I really suggest you to update your BIOS. Lenovo has released some updates that had fixed some minor concerns I had about fan speed, so they might have also fixed something in your model. I'm fairly happy with the computer now
            Another ideapad5 15are05 user here running a famous rolling release distro.

            While the fan noise really got better with the latest firmware (e7cn25ww), I had massive display driver problems with it. I got stack traces indicating problems with radeon_si.so all the time (about one per hour). I could only reisub the system. I tried everything, building mesa from source (20.2.0), building mainline kernel (5.8rc3). Nothing helped, it was a nightmare.

            Ultimately, I decided to downgrade the firmware back to e7cn24ww and now the system is stable again.

            For the moment, I wouldn't recommend e7cn25ww to any 15are05 user.

            UPDATE: I can confirm that with kernel 5.8-rc4 (that includes this particular patch) plus the kernel parameter idle=nomwait seem to solve any issues so far with the latest e7cn25ww bios. I hope I don't jinx it, but for now I have no issues since 5.8-rc4 release and enjoy having a more silent and stable notebook.
            Last edited by ryad; 08 July 2020, 03:34 PM. Reason: adding experience with current kernel and bios

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            • #7
              I find it interesting that while the model naming between the 14" and 15" are so similar, they appear to be vastly different. As a 14" user, I only have available one bios from Lenovo, DTCN18WW(V1.04). This was the original shipping bios, and later in May they released DTCN19WW(V1.05). This bios had major problems in that the cpu was locked at 1.4ghz on DC power. The bios (1.05) was later pulled by Lenovo and they reposted the 1.04 version back on their support site.

              dragonn I'd love to submit tickets and give feedback, but sometimes it's so hard to narrow down how to do so, and even what the problem is. I had a problem with my desktop PC where a game would crash. The errors were related to amdgpu resetting, but was it amdgpu? Mesa? Proton? The game? I think the ticket was transferred between three different places and I lost track of it.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by rogowskys View Post
                dragonn I'd love to submit tickets and give feedback, but sometimes it's so hard to narrow down how to do so, and even what the problem is. I had a problem with my desktop PC where a game would crash. The errors were related to amdgpu resetting, but was it amdgpu? Mesa? Proton? The game? I think the ticket was transferred between three different places and I lost track of it.
                None program should crash the GPU, so you can at the start ignore Proton and The Game. Even a badly written program is not allowed to crash a kernel driver.

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                • #9
                  Just created an account to share my experience with the IdeaPad 5 15 with the 4600U. On Fedora 32, everything works out of the box, even the multimedia keys to adjust the volume & brightness, toggle airplane mode and so on. After update to 5.6.18, the touchpad was not responding anymore, but soon 5.6.19 landed and now it works again. Going to sleep and waking up when the cover is moved runs out of the box too. Had just once a problem, the WIFI was dead after wake up from sleep, but this never happened again. Btw, have formatting errors in Firefox.

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                  • #10
                    I have an Acer Aspire with a 4700U. Did not have any stability issues with the GPU. However, backlight-dimming does not work as expected. It works somehow but only dims a tiny percent between 2^16 and ~55.000... Looks like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHALqGVYgcU
                    The driver seems to send the dimming data via eDP via it´s amdgpu_dm driver.. However there seems to be another issues.. Maybe it´s not sent correctly? I run 5.8-rc3 kernel.. in earlier kernels the backlight did not dim at all

                    Did a UEFI update in hope, they fixed something, but didn´t change anything.. This is probably a thing between the display and the GPU and not controlled by UEFI...

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