Latest AMDGPU DC Plays Nicer With Raven Ridge But Still Linux Gaming Stability Issues

Back in February was the exciting AMD Raven Ridge desktop APU launch with the Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics. Sadly, however, the Raven Ridge Linux support still appears to be a bit problematic but there have been improvements in recent weeks.

Going back to our original testing of Raven Ridge with the Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G APUs, there were some display issues as well as some game stability issues.

Fortunately, with the latest Linux 4.16 Git kernel there have been some Raven fixes trickling in this month. Additionally, there are more improvements for Linux 4.17 as the next kernel cycle.

This week I spent some time trying the Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G retail APUs with retail motherboards on their latest BIOS and using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with both the Linux 4.16 and DRM-Next kernels. Additionally, trying out Mesa 18.0-rc5 and Mesa 18.1-devel from the Padoka PPAs.

It's good to report now that the display issues appear fixed. I am no longer running into any mode-setting issues or other display problems for the Vega 8 graphics.

But it's not all smooth sailing as when trying to run some fresh Linux gaming benchmarks, I routinely am encountering system hangs. It seems to be semi-random but generally can't get a successful run out of a complete set of our usual Linux gaming benchmarks without hitting a hang on either systems. But occasionally when running pure CPU/system workloads, I am able to occasionally hang the system as well, so it might not be an issue isolated to just the AMDGPU DRM driver...

So for now the Raven Ridge Linux support doesn't appear fully baked yet. For what it's worth besides the two different Raven APUs, I have been testing with two different motherboards as well to the same behavior. If any other Raven Ridge Linux users have a different experience, be sure to share in the forums as well as with any tricks you may have learned along the way.