Here's the long awaited update to my Slackware rebuild started in October (see 'To Everything There Is a Season' post Oct. 10, 2020). The new Ryzen system is up and running Slackware64-current multilib. I am a couple of weeks behind on updates. The new KDE/Plasma5 and Xfce 4.14 just hit /testing and should soon be merged in the main tree. The 15.0 release is looking good so far and will really shine on this new system.

All assembled with NO LEDS!, cleaned/polished, and ready for action. Besides the liquid cooled Ryzen 9 3800X we have:

GIGABYTE AORUS Gen4 M.2 2280 1TB PCI-Express 4.0 x4, NVMe
Crucial Ballistix 32GB (2 x 16GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3600 (PC4 28800)

Recently we ran into a glitch using an online editor in a website CMS with the Firefox browser. Every time we tried to paste plain text into the editor, the editor would crash or display an error message. Other browsers worked fine (chromium, SeaMonkey), and Firefox worked fine on other workstations. It turns out it was the method some online editors use to process clipboard events. In 'about:config' the offending browser had

dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled

set to 'false'. Resetting to 'true' fixed the issue (the default setting). I had probably set this, or some no longer in use add-on/extension had set it, to enforce additional security or privacy.

It is finally time to say goodbye to the MSI X99S Krait SLI build from 2014. This was my first Intel CPU build since 1999-2000. That winter I built an Athlon64 system with a Gigabyte Geforce 256DDR as more performance than what Intel offered (no 64-bit!) at a much better price.

It was shortly thereafter that I briefly switched to SLAMD64 until Slackware64 was released.

I started out with an Intel i7-5820k and 16 GB DDR4, with a Gigabyte Geforce GTX660 Windforce. Then came the EVGA GTX 1060, followed by an additional 16 GB DDR4 (I deplore empty slots...), 256 GB NVME, and the current Intel i7-6850K. When I added the new CPU I upgraded the passive CPU heatsink and fan with a Thermaltake 240mm dual fan closed loop liquid coolor (Water 3.0 pump).

When Slackware64-current added kernel 5.4.x, I temporarily blacked out and replaced the Nvidia GPU with the

** XFX Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC Ultra III **

Why? Absolutely no idea. As I said, I must have blacked out. This is a massive GPU card and barely fits in the Antec P100 case.

The bonus of a Navi class CPU on kernel 5.4 is that I can now run a full opensource amdgpu/Mesa GPU stack with OpenGL and vulkan hardware 3D accelleration. I can hardly wait to see what this PCI-express 4.0 card can do on the new GIGABYTE X570 AORUS ELITE AMD Ryzen motherboard with PCI-express 4.0

Now I just have to rip out the old Intel guts, and plug in the new AMD guts...and clean out the dust.

Gandalf the Grey is dead.

Long live Gandalf the White!

For many years I used nvidia drivers and utilities along with an xorg.conf to set up 2 to 3 monitors on KDE and Xfce. Recently I switched to the new AMD NAVI GPUs (RX 590 and RX 5700 XT) and the new Slackware-current amdgpu driver stack. In KDE, setting up dual monitors was easy in their display GUI, but Xfce-4.12 was problematic. No matter what I did, the second monitor was always on the virtual right side of the primaty monitor, or the primary and secondary were switched. A workaround is to invoke xrandr directly:

Placing this command in $HOME/.xinitrc automates the process. This also
fixed tthe monitor jumbling when using the screensaver and/or powering
off the monitors.

On some AMD Ryzen X570 (Gigabyte) motherboards, virtualization is disabled in the UEFI firmware (BIOS). If are having trouble running qemu or virtualbox, the kvm module is loaded, and lscpu indicates that the CPU supports KVM, go into the BIOS, Tweaker menu tab (advanced mode), find "Advanced CPU settings" and enable "SVM mode".

On some boards, you can find the KVM settings under "Advanced CPU Core Settings" option group, under M.I.T tab - "Advanced Frequency Settings" option group - frequency settings - CPU core settings.

We regret to announce that John Conway, the John von Neumann Professor Emeritus of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, died April 11. He was 82 -- Princeton University

One of my Slackware systems has two optical drives: Blu-Ray and DVD: /dev/sr0 and /dev/sr1. In 14.2 as well as current, if neither are used for awhile, some of the udev symlinks to /dev/sr0 disappear. This becomes maddening (as in WTF?) when I'm trying to run my qemu VMs and I get the error:

Taking a peek shows:

instead of the expected list:

Rebooting or reloading the udev rules (as root) restores the expected symlinks:

I suppose I could just tell qemu to look at /dev/sr0, but where's the fun in that?

I have finally had some time to compile the benchmarks for a series of GPUs on the new mini-ITX build. The purpose was to see if the amdgpu driver is ready to compete with Nvidia on a Linux powered game box. The GPUs choices are simply what I had available and fairly recent, except for the RX 5700 XT, which was a new purchase.

System Configuration

Software
Slackware development is proceeding at a brisk pace: kernel is 5.4.22 as of this writing, along with numerous updates. Since I have since sold the GTX 1060, I will not repeat the benchmarks. These results still give a good snapshot into the state of amdgpu and Slackware.

The GPU Contenders

Benchmarks

Results
All benchmark were run at default PTS settings and default GPU clocks. For the GTX 1060, I added runs comparing the nouveau driver. Some of the benchmarks did not complete using the nouveau driver. Although nouveau is fine for general desktop use, for gaming and other heavy 3D tasks, amdgpu or Nvidia is required. At this stage, it looks like amdgpu can keep up with the Nvidia proprietary drivers quite well. The RX 590 is the same general generation as the GTX 1060 and is on par with the nvidia driver on the Unigine benchmarks. The RX 590 outperforms the GTX 1060 by a good margin on STK. There were some anomalously high frame rate on some of the STK 4K maps.  These may be due to the skipping of some texture or other feature at that resolution.

The monstrous XFX Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC Ultra (so THICC...barely fits in my full tower case) is aggressively factory clocked and aimed to compete with the GTX 2060/2070 generation cards. The tests were run with the dual BIOS switch set to quiet mode. This keeps the 3 fans off until the temperature exceeds 60° C. I haven’t tried the OC switch position yet. The RX 5700 XT is marketed as a 1440p card; I decided to push it hard on 4K on the Unigine benchmarks with amdgpu driver. It generally outperforms the GTX 1060 and GTX 1080.

The Unigine Superposition benchmark is a heavy stress test of the PC and GPU. Here the amdgpu driver perform quite well against Nvidia. The PC as well as all cards struggled at 4K ultra mode setting (<8 fps), with the RX 5700 XT taking the lead at 8 fps.  At more reasonable 4K settings, the results where fun to watch on screen, and showed the potential of the amdgpu driver.

The RX 5700 XT performs quite well at 4K with the following Steam games I’ve tried so far:

These last 2 use vulkan and I set RADV_PERFTEST=aco to use Valve’s higher performing ACO shader compiler [EDIT: No longer needed; ACO is now enabled by default].  These games were run on my i7-6850K 32GB tower PC, with Freesync and tearfree turned on.

Conclusion
The Mesa and amdgpu drivers currently don’t just show promise, but are now ready for immersive 3D games.  If you are tired of fighting with Nvidia installations, or just the outrageous expense, give AMD Radeon a try.

As always: YMMV!

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Pat Volkerding for Slackware, and to numerous contributors to Slackware, and to the Slackware community. Thanks also to ttks (freenode ##slackware-help) for his generous financial contribution.

In the "what could go wrong category" for information found on the interwebs, there is a work around for the missing support for the 0x8688 sensor in the new Gigabyte GIGABYTE X570 I AORUS PRO motherboard. [EDIT: This seems to be applicable to any GIGABYTE AURUS X570 motherboard to at least kernel 5.4.x]

Out of the box, CPU temperatures/voltages are available (k10temp), as are GPU temperatures/fan and voltages (amdgpu). Motherboord and CPU fans however are missing. To the kernel boot parameters in '/boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/elilo.conf' add 'acpi_enforce_resources=lax':

Then load the it87 module in rc.local (or /etc/modeprobe.d/ if preferred):

to force the closest compatible sensor ID. Now, I have the sensor data. I'm not sure how accurate the motherboard temperatures and voltages are, but the fan speeds appear correct. Fan assignments were determined by unplugging each one to observe the drop to zero rpm.

To close out the old and ring in the New Year, I've added my EVGA GTX 1060 6GB GPU to the benchmark comparison. Both the GTX 1060 and GTX 950 are short, single fan ITX form factor cards that will fit the mini-ITX case. We'll have to wait for CES 2020 to see what GPUs AMD announces, and what form factors manufacturers push out. Rumor has it the the second generation Navi will be twice as fast as the current Radeon 5700 XT series. I noticed that the XFX RX590 is a dual BIOS card with a switch - the "perf" run is with that switch set for a more aggressive fan curve (1660+ rpm at idle) vs. quite mode (880 rpm). It didn't provide a significant performance increase but did keep the GPU about 10C cooler. All runs were with VSYNC off but all other settings (driver and phoronix) at default values.

The RX590 ekes out a few more fps over the GTX1060, but generally the performance is nearly equivalent.