AMD GPU at boot

[Woof]

Before typing I'm already feeling the burning shame of a n00b question, but anyway, here goes...

I finally built my Talos II (dual 18-core), temporarily installed a Radeon RX 580 (I plan on a Radeon Pro W5700 but it currently has a waterblock fitted) and installed Ubuntu 21.10 (server install followed by desktop packages). It's early days and it's mostly working (Firefox 96 has issues, but one thing at a time). So far so good. I've disabled the built-in VGA via the jumper but it still starts up with this and then hands over to the Radeon card. Is this normal?

See the attached image.

[MPC7500]

If you're on System Package v1.00, the jumper doesn't work. So this is "normal".
From my POV it's anyway better to use the AST till Petitboot and then to disable it via Kernel command line to switch then to the AMD GPU.

[Woof]

Thanks, I'll check tomorrow (I'm assuming being a brand new mobo it wouldn't have the v1.0 firmware, but in any case I'll look at this).

Where can I find info like this, or does everyone just know and I'm late to the party? The quick start guide seems to trail off when it should just be getting started, but I did (just now) find the other guides and I'll look through them (in particular adding the GPU firmware).

[ClassicHasClass]

That's a stonking system you have there. Makes this dual-8 look like a toy. What's your aim for it? Are you using the HSFs, or a custom cooling solution?

The jumper works properly on my two T2s, or at least it seems to. But blacklisting the AST is never a bad idea with a GPU.

[Woof]

I currently have the HSFs but I'm working on a water cooling solution for it (which I'll report back on once it's finished). We do custom 3D engines and tooling at work and I was looking into alternatives to our current Threadripper setups for texture processing. It's a highly parallel task that benefits from many threads, currently running best on the 64C/128T 3990X, but I was curious as to what else is out there.

I've not had much time to experiment so far, and it'll be at least a month before I get some quality time with this machine.

[MauryG5]

Unfortunately the problem for us at Power is always the same, on the software side that you will have to use for your works, what optimization will you have ?!  We usually suffer on this front compared to X86 ...

[Woof]

I'll be doing some comparison between the 3990X and my dual Power9 running our custom texture compression code. I'll not get around to it for a while though. The code scales quite well with more cores but eventually becomes memory bound. Our 3990X machines here are all overclocked and hand tuned, so I think it'll be a tough one to beat.

[MPC7500]

POWER9 is already aged. It will easily be slaughtered by the Threadripper.
Ah, BTW you can overclock POWER9, too.
Maybe you could provide some benchmarks, if you're finished.

[Woof]

I'll post real findings but I found the 3990X doesn't scale out linearly for our use. For our highly parallelised task (imagine 65'000 blocks of the same size being processed) going from 64 to 128 cores yields a 37% speed increase. I think we get hit by the four memory channels.

Overclocking the Power9 is on my list to look at (I'm assuming the power stages to be the limit here though). OC'ing the 3990X is a complete power hog, and we're able to draw over 800W for the CPU/mobo alone (for the TR Pros we have here with 4x RTX6000 we struggle to keep in the 2kW power limit of the PSU and wall socket).

[MauryG5]

Woof do you like me use Ubuntu on Power? We are few who use it here, you too have found the Firefox problems I have been talking about for some time, such as the bug of the bookmark that does not work and the problem that occurs when you use Firefox on certain sites ...

[Woof]

Yes, I installed Ubuntu and tried Firefox. On the first day I only noticed the font issue (easily repro'd by opening the web dev tools, which just show white). Then today, second day, I noticed FF complains on launch about not being able to save the bookmarks.

I wanted to try a few OS variants, and Ubuntu was my go-to since we have it on lots of machines successfully at work (all x64).

I was going to look at Chrome, but perhaps some other Linux too. Ideally I'd like multiple installed (big and little endian, for testing, though more out of habit now since I've not shipped anything on BE for over 10 years), though I wasn't sure whether this would need multiple disks rather than multiple partitions.

[MauryG5]

I personally took 3 hard disks and installed Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora.  I was fine with Fedora until it made the switch to Gnome 40, it literally sucks as they haven't fully optimized the code and it was slow, jerky and almost unusable.  I then used Ubuntu which in fact I realized that as fluidity and use it turned out to be the best but unfortunately it has several small bugs that have never been solved unfortunately.  Besides Firefox for example there is another bug which consists in not reading audio CDs, you put a common CD and it does not load the tracks.  Debian 11 has improved a lot I must say and now that Chromium 97 has arrived, I am starting to use it a little more and it is good overall.  I have compiled the Kernel in version 5.15.3 with 4K pages and with a firmware update I can make the AMD Radeon 5700 XT 50 th Anniversary edition work well.  I'd like to have Ubuntu troubleshoot but I still haven't figured out how to report it to them directly if I have to tell you the truth ...

[Woof]

Answering one of my own questions: multi-boot off the same disk is straightforward, I'm running both Void and Ubuntu on different partitions (I just need to get the video bios loaded now).

[ClassicHasClass]

The main problem with Fedora is libgraphene, which is known, and sharkcz has been looking into it. A simple rebuild suffices to patch in place in the meantime if you are affected.

[MauryG5]

Classic the problem is that I do not know if I am capable of making this modification, it depends on the complexity of this procedure you are saying. However, before unmounting the Fedora 35 hardisk, I had installed libgraphene, I had also written it in the discussion concerning Fedora 35 but unfortunately nothing has changed because obviously we also need this patch you are talking about. I don't know if I can put this patch but ...