Ryzen 5 2400G Working Flawlessly on Mint 19.1

[silvatech]

I think we have to look at these problems the other way around. Instead of saying Linux (or any way you wanna call it) doesn't support this or that piece of hardware, we have to be impressed such mainly community-driven project is able to support about 20 years of hardware and software from various sources.

Yes, Linux Mint 19 doesn't support Raven Ridge processors by default, but think about how many other parts it has offered continued support for long-term users. As I don't see any profit intents within the development of LM19, I see no real drive to always offer "competitive" features.

Besides, two things are derived from that thought.
1 - a subgroup of users who want to make a "bleeding edge LM" are able to do so, by branching into another community-driven project
2 - the many degrees of freedom provided by FOSS aid users get their own flavored Linux Mint based systems, even if official support is unavailable.

That said, I'm on kernel 4.18.14, easily updated via Ubuntu Kernel Update Utility. Kernels 12 through 14 have had small mentions of AMDGPU/Raven Ridge improvements ("hang fixes"). Knowing that someone out there is making my life better with no direct interaction makes me extremely grateful for the system build I have at the moment.

Don't get me wrong. I'm grateful for what the community has done and is doing for Linux. In the past I would have been up to the challenge but these days I have other kind of technical projects that I need to spend my time on. Windows isn't and option. It's a shame, for my needs the 2400G would have been perfect. I don't need high end graphics and don't play games, but do some graphics intensive work inwhich the APU would have been perfect.

Can anyone suggest a Ryzen 5 and sub $100 GPU combination that will just work? My old Phenom II X4 955 is starting to experience some hardware problems. Other than bad SATA ports on my motherboard still does the job.

ryzen 5 2600 is a really nice processor for the price. If you can up your budget to 130 bucks you can get an nvidia 1050. Which is a nice card. It does out perform the GPU that comes with the 2400g. Although 2400g is amazing bang for your buck for what you get. Could save some money with near same performance by getting one of the sells on the ryzen 5 1600 to.

[mattlach]

I disabled IOMMU and SRIOV in BIOS, and this has made a huge difference.

I no longer have to retry several times to get the system to boot, and it hasn't frozen yet.

This far the only thing I did was to update the kernel to 4.18.0-8. I'm still on the shipping version of Mesa.

Ubuntu 18.10 is right around the corner, and with it, we should have Mint 19.1 fairly soon. Hopefully the newer MESA versions (18.2 was it?) will be included there.

[fungus]

Support for Raven Ridge is rapidly improving, apparently the 4.19 kernel will have solved most of the issues. 4.19 is at rc8 stage now, hopefully it will be released as stable very soon (maybe Monday, Oct 22nd?). If ppl cannot wait, they could opt for Manjaro which supports latest rc kernels - but IMHO Manjaro ships with too many other bugs due to it's "cutting edge above stable" approach

[Byke]

Thanks for the information! These improvements sound very promising.

Kernel 4.19.0-rc8 can also be found on Ukuu if you toggle the "Hide unstable releases" button. I look forward to testing a stable release.

4.18.15 didn't bring anything exciting for the matter, if anyone's curious.

[Byke]

Updated my first post. I dropped Ukuu because Mint's native kernels support my system!

I recently fixed my "long" boot time and my kernel went from 36s to 5s according to systemd-analyze!

We have to change /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume which has a line

Code: Select all

RESUME=UUID=somenumber

to be changed to

Code: Select all

RESUME=/dev/mint-vg/swap_1 

The easiest way, for me, to modify the file is

Code: Select all

sudo xed /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume

and manually type stuff. I'm not good with "sed" stuff which would edit the file in-line.

[n2locarz]

"Ryzen Working Flawlessly on Mint 19.1"

Please don't think I am trolling here, just venting mostly.I also have a Ryzen machine with tons of issues and LAUGHED when I read thru this post.

Title: Ryzen 5 2400G Working Flawlessly on Mint 19.1

OP: "Linux Mint is my to-go system"

A few lines in: OP: "Doesn't crash/freeze often with normal use...."

I'm a rookie Linux user and love playing with Linux Mint on my older hardware. If my Windows setup would ever freeze , even once a month I would be pissed. But somehow Linux "Doesn't Crash/Freeze Often"constitutes as "Working Flawless"?? Bias standards perhaps?

[Byke]

It's alright, n2locarz.

I think I phrased myself baddly. It hardly freezes, and when it does, I'm mostly to blame (because I'm using testing/unstable stuff). I also tried to phrase it that way so people wouldn't expect it to be "foolproof".

It still breaks (if I try hard enough), but I think it is reliable enough that I'd trust Ryzen 2400g+Linux Mint with any workload I can think about.

Thanks for your input, I'll correct my statement in the first post ^^

[cuke8466]

August 2019 and I'm still hitting my reset button daily!

Turned off hardware acceleration in firefox and it seemed to help a bit.

Does anyone have a 2400G that is "Working Flawlessly on Mint 19.1"?

[fungus]

August 2019 and I'm still hitting my reset button daily!

Which errors do you find in syslog (/var/log/syslog) just after you have reset the system after a lockup? What have you done to fix the issue?

I'm running Kubuntu (fully updated) and it has been rock solid since I upgraded the firmware, a description of firmware related errors and a possible fix can be found here: viewtopic.php?f=49&t=287070

[Byke]

Does anyone have a 2400G that is "Working Flawlessly on Mint 19.1"?

Since my last edits, the system had become stable. I have since migrated from Linux Mint to Fedora 30, so I can't further provide feedback on Mint, but the system was in a working state when I left.

If you're able to get an updated kernel (maybe 5.x series and above, or late 4.21+ series), you should be able to use the system with no trouble. Then, I'm not sure if this helps in any way, but I used Padoka PPA for update mesa drivers to correctly handle the Vega APU, installing its `mesa-vulkan-drivers` and `mesa-vulkan-drivers:i386`.

I distrohopped because I was frustrated by how I had to keep going for PPAs or compiling things myself for certain features, plus it's a hassle to compile Wine for 32 and 64-bit architectures in Debian-based systems.

It is certainly doable, and now that I have experience I can say 2400g runs fine on Mint, but I can't confirm a good 'out-of-the-box' experience at the moment.

[cuke8466]

Decided to upgrade to Mint 19.2. (Does this make this post off topic?) and now on 5.0.0-25 kernel. Happy to report no resets in 3 days!!! Not sure which upgrade is responsible, but the system seems stable now. I will follow up if this changes.

[Byke]

It's definitely not off-topic. I knew you needed slightly updated kernels (4.17 and above) and MAYBE slightly updated Mesa (19.0 and above?), but I couldn't test Mint 19.2 for those things.

It's definitely doable to make it work on 19.1, but now I'd highly recommend going 19.2 as you did. Cheers on your working system!

[Huecuva]

Hi, sorry to dredge up an old thread but this is very relevant to my current issue.

I've just finished building a Ryzen 5 2400G rig with 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM and an MSI B450M Bazooka V2 motherboard which I've updated to the latest BIOS. I can't even get Mint to load past the live USB boot menu when I tell it to start Mint. The screen goes black without turning the monitor off and just stays that way. I've tried with both Cinnamon and MATE and I can't make either of them work. Updating the Kernel or anything is out of the question as I can't even get a desktop or even a terminal to load. I'm thinking maybe it doesn't like the Vega graphics but if you were able to get it working on the same chip then I don't know what's going on. This is really annoying.

EDIT: I'm really tempted to put an old Radeon 6870 I have lying around in it to see if I can get a picture that way.

EDIT again: BTW, I'm using a recently downloaded 19.2 ISO that I've burned to USB using the built in Mint USB Image Writer.

[Byke]

Dear Huecuva,

your build should be good to go as is. I believe mint 19.2 already has a kernel with stable vega graphics. Maybe it's some BIOS option regarding your iGFX that has not been set up properly.

You can confirm your kernel version with `uname` -r in a terminal. Since you downloaded a live usb version, you can check on some wiki or on their release notes.

Have you tried opening other TTYs? like ctrl+alt+f2 and then going back to ctrl+alt+f1? I also think there's a small chance your video output is going to another port.

You can try downloading live usb versions of other distros like ubuntu, fedora, manjaro and popOS to see if they have the same behavior. The point here is to simply try to reach the live-usb graphical part.

[Huecuva]

Thanks for responding, Byke. As it turns out, the kernel in Mint LTS at the time the devs created their installer .iso did not support these newer Ryzens and the installer hasn't been updated with the new drivers. I was able to find an updated tutorial regarding that nomodeset command and that was able to get me into a GUI. Now it should be easy to install a newer kernel.

[Byke]

Oh, I didn't realize in your first post you were talking about LTS.

Right now, Ryzen doesn't seem to be ready for LTS, because it needs some packages from an year ago that are not ready to be made into LTS (kernel, Mesa graphics, Vulkan...).

I suggest you either pick mint 19.2 non-LTS or update the important packages (but, thus, creating an amalgam or LTS + not-so-stable packages).