[Discuss] Issues with new Linux computer mostly addressed

[Jean Taggart]

Hello all,

There have been some cheap all in one pc’s that had a “soft” reset button. (The kind that came with tons of pre-bundled crap)

It was done intentionally because users would get frustrated with all the crap bundles, so they forgo the reset button. Haven’t seen those in a while tho

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jun 9, 2018, at 12:05 PM, Deryk Barker (Honorary Colleague) <dbarker at camosun.bc.ca> wrote:
> 
> Alan, unless things have changed recently, the reset button simply asserts a reset line/signal on the bus (not that PCIe is really a bus any more).
> 
> If the OS is totally locked up and not even sampling the bus lines...
> 
> -------
> Deryk Barker, Faculty Emeritus
> Computer Science Department
> Camosun College, Victoria BC
> 
> ________________________________________
> From: Discuss [discuss-bounces at vlug.org] on behalf of Alan W. Irwin [Alan.W.Irwin1234 at gmail.com]
> Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2018 10:34 AM
> To: discuss at vlug.org
> Subject: Re: [Discuss] Issues with new Linux computer mostly addressed
> 
> After 3 days of up time, I just experienced another lock up of our new
> computer for kernel version 4.16.12.  And this lock up was so harsh
> that the reset button gave no response (which I don't understand
> because I thought that button was pure hardware and not anything to do
> with the Linux kernel or BIOS at all).  As a result, I had to
> completely power down the computer, pause for several seconds and
> reboot to gain control of it again.  Furthermore, my recent experience
> is these lock ups go away if the AMD RX 550 graphics card is not used.
> This is consistent with commentary I have just found that was in
> response to
> <https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Best-Linux-4.17-Features>.
> To summarize that commentary (accessible at the end of the article),
> it appears there is an overall issue of immature Linux kernel support
> for several recent generations of AMD graphics cards which can cause
> lock ups, and these issues will only be resolved by kernel version
> 4.17.x where x is large enough to work out the bugs in the
> just-released 4.17.0.
> 
> Given this bad Linux situation with recent generations of AMD graphics
> cards, I am frankly surprised that Michael Larabel, the Phoronix guy
> who writes many articles lauding Linux support for AMD graphics is not
> saying anything about how long (more than a year for the RX 550 and
> longer for some older generations) it has been taking to resolve these
> issues.  Anyhow, I naively trusted his positive Linux review of the RX
> 550 that he wrote a year ago just when that card first became
> available for sale, and now I am paying the price.
> 
> I am confident that at least in the long term these issues will be
> resolved since AMD builds their amdgpu-pro driver for Linux right on
> top of the open-source amdgpu driver.  So it is in their direct
> financial interest to make sure these issues go away.  But the
> severity of this recent lock up has convinced me to go back to my
> strategy of bypassing this card (using a different computer to display
> results in X terminal mode) until Linux kernel support for modern AMD
> graphics finally matures.
> 
> Alan
> __________________________
> Alan W. Irwin
> 
> Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
> University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).
> 
> Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
> implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
> Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
> software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
> (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
> and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
> __________________________
> 
> Linux-powered Science
> __________________________
> 
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