GhostBSD and Ryzen

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NevilleGoddard
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GhostBSD and Ryzen

Post by NevilleGoddard »

My FX-8350 cpu recently died (one week out of the warranty period if you can believe it!) :cry: so I had to rebuild my computer. I could have just bought another cpu but my motherboard was a dud (dead RAM slot and PCI slot) so I decided to see how GhostBSD would run on the new Ryzen cpu.
My specs (partial)

CPU: Ryzen 5 1600
Motherboard : Asus Prime X370A
RAM: Corsair 16gb DDR4

I installed the new parts hooked up the drives, graphics card and new sound card and fired it up.

It wouldn't boot to the desktop. I got messages about not being able to read /hd1 or something and then I remembered I had edited fstab because I have 3 drives so I edited fstab while as single user to only include the boot drive and it booted fine. After boot I edited fstab to include the other drives and all is well.

Then there was no internet. The ethernet device on my old motherboard was em0. On the new motherboard it is re0 (Realtek). I edited the line ifconfig_em0="DHCP" to ifconfig_re0="DHCP" in rc.conf and now internet is fine. Quite fast actually. :D

Then no sound. My card (Onkyo SE-90 WAVIO) with Envy24MT chip had no driver attached. I put "snd_envy24ht_load="YES"" into loader.conf and the sound is great. However the xfce4 mixer won't change the volume. Only the PCM volume. Maybe I can fix this. This was strange because on my old sound card the kernel module was loaded automatically and it worked "out of the box".

The other change I had to make was to disable powerd in rc.conf. I was getting a lot of error messages about not being able to set cpu frequency and it was running slow. Disabling powerd improved things a lot. Perhaps powerd needs to be updated? I don't know if this powerd problem would adversely affect an install of GhostBSD.

All in all everything seems to be running fine.

So if you're contemplating using a Ryzen go for it. :D
ASX
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Re: GhostBSD and Ryzen

Post by ASX »

NevilleGoddard wrote:All in all everything seems to be running fine.

So if you're contemplating using a Ryzen go for it. :D
Interesting report, unfortunately there are a few reports out there that will leave me away from any ryzen cpu until the bugs will be fixed.
One bug is relatively old (FMA) and at this time should be already solved, but another one is still under investigation, abd it appear to affect only a part of users and rather randomly and only while performing some specific task, like gcc compiling.

FMA bug:
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/2 ... -ryzen-bug

Other:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Ryzen#Segm ... ompilation
http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_ ... ler-Issues
https://community.amd.com/thread/215773

I hope all will be fine for you and your hardware, however I would recommend to keep a backup of your data. ;)
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NevilleGoddard
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Re: GhostBSD and Ryzen

Post by NevilleGoddard »

I'll try and compile something later (LibreOffice?) and see what happens.
I've only just started using the new system and I haven't encountered any problems - yet.
If all goes well I'll get an NVMe SSD and see how things go.
All my data are backed up on my other 2 disks. ;)
Thanks for the info.
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NevilleGoddard
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Re: GhostBSD and Ryzen

Post by NevilleGoddard »

It seems that the Ryzen "problem" is due to overclocking. No problem with Ryzen cpus themselves.
I'll try some compiling and also try to build an ISO and see how things turn out.
ASX
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Re: GhostBSD and Ryzen

Post by ASX »

NevilleGoddard wrote:It seems that the Ryzen "problem" is due to overclocking. No problem with Ryzen cpus themselves.
I'll try some compiling and also try to build an ISO and see how things turn out.
Nope, while overclocking can lead to issues for itself, there are issues also without overclocking, (generally under heavy load).
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NevilleGoddard
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Re: GhostBSD and Ryzen

Post by NevilleGoddard »

Whoops. :shock: It seems you're right ASX.
I'll try something tomorrow.
Thanks again.
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ericbsd
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Re: GhostBSD and Ryzen

Post by ericbsd »

Since server with AMD is not popular it can only make sense that AMD is not well supported, I have been using Phenom 2 6 core for years and I am not if I will upgrade for Ryzen or Intel.
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NevilleGoddard
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Re: GhostBSD and Ryzen

Post by NevilleGoddard »

So far the Ryzen cpu has performed very well and is very quiet and energy efficient. It cost me about $260 US. 6 cores and 12 threads so in the cpu graph in the xfce panel it shows 12 cores :)
The other important consideration is the motherboard. I don't know for sure but Intel motherboards may be a little better but they can be more expensive, especially for the high end intel cpus.
Mine was around $200 US and that's with the better x370 chip set. A b350 motherboard is much cheaper.
For the money I personally think you can't beat AMD cpus.

But you're right at the moment AMD cpus are not popular with servers also with pre-built computers AMD cpus are not popular. But they are getting more popular. At Amazon the Ryzen5 1600 is #3 in sales and the Ryzen7 1700 is #4 the corei7-7700k is #1 and the i5 is #2. In the UK Ryzen is #1.

If AMD can sort out the problems ASX pointed out there's no reason to pay more for intel in my opinion.

Hopefully the powerd problem can be fixed too. I don't know if this is a FreeBSD problem or an AMD problem.
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NevilleGoddard
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Re: GhostBSD and Ryzen

Post by NevilleGoddard »

I'm thinking of getting an NVMe ssd.

Any horror stories I should know about before I get one? :D
ASX
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Re: GhostBSD and Ryzen

Post by ASX »

NevilleGoddard wrote:I'm thinking of getting an NVMe ssd.

Any horror stories I should know about before I get one? :D
Check your hardware about support for NVME disks, also look at this thread in FreeBSD forum: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/58170/
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