Ryzen Stability Issues Are Still Affecting Some FreeBSD Users

Written by Michael Larabel in BSD on 23 April 2018 at 10:42 AM EDT. 32 Comments
BSD
While in recent months there have been some improvements to FreeBSD that have helped yield greater reliability in running AMD Ryzen processors on this BSD operating system, some users are still reporting hard to diagnose stability problems on FreeBSD.

For some, FreeBSD on Ryzen is still leading to lock-ups, even while the system may be idle. Also making it hard to debug, for some they can trigger a lock-up within an hour of booting their system while for others they may be able to make it a week or two before hitting any stability problem.

The thread over FreeBSD Ryzen stability was recently ignited back on freebsd-stable. For those affected there doesn't appear to be a particular BIOS setting or FreeBSD kernel setting to workaround the issue and there is at least one FreeBSD user reporting of stability issues on EPYC hardware in that thread.

My *BSD Ryzen/EPYC experience has been fine with recent builds, but then again I am usually just using FreeBSD/TrueOS/DragonFlyBSD for hours at a time for benchmarking before changing it out again and not running the systems for weeks at a time with the BSDs. I do have it on my ever busy TODO list though to try out the Ryzen 2600X/2700X new processors with the BSDs when time allows to see how that goes with the new AMD X470 series motherboards.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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