Strange IOMMU issue on Ubuntu 18.04 with Ryzen 5 3600

[Musty]

I have recently built a desktop (MSI B450m VHD Max, Ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 2060 basic info).

 

I set it up as a dual boot system. I have one NVMe drive with both windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04 operating systems (Linux Kernel 4.15) on it, and a second 4Tb HDD for data (partitioned in two: 2Tb NTFs exclusively for use on windows, and 2Tb EXT4).

 

I was having some strange instability on my Ubuntu setup. I seem to have fixed it but was wondering if anyone here could explain it? 

 

Basically, while downloading a relatively large (80gb) dataset my 2Tb EXT4 partition kept on remounting as read only after encountering an error. I checked the drive using a bunch of methods and everything came back fine, didn't seem to be any bad sectors.  

 

Checking dmesg, it always happened after a series of IOMMU error messages eventually leading to trying to write something strange to the disk that it didn't accept (unfortunately I didn't save the logs). Disabling IOMMU in my grub config seems to have solved it in the short term. 

 

Has anyone else come across this kind of issue? I guess updating my Linux Kernel might resolve it, but was holding out for the next LTS version to come to the software updater.

[Ashleyyyy]

updating to a newer distro (Ubuntu 20.04 for example) will likely fix it. 18.04 is much older than your hardware and that can cause issues.

[Musty]

1 hour ago, Twilight said:

updating to a newer distro (Ubuntu 20.04 for example) will likely fix it. 18.04 is much older than your hardware and that can cause issues.

Yeah I was planning on going to 20.04 soon. I was expecting to be prompted to by Software Updater any day now anyway so was holding off for that, but might just do it now 

[Ashleyyyy]

2 minutes ago, MustyStag said:

Yeah I was planning on going to 20.04 soon. I was expecting to be prompted to by Software Updater any day now anyway so was holding off for that, but might just do it now 

you can force it manually.

 

before proceeding MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP OF YOUR DATA!!!!

 

Quote

do-release-upgrade -c

will tell you what release is available.

 

Quote

sudo do-release-upgrade

will let you update to the new version.

[Musty]

2 minutes ago, Twilight said:

you can force it manually.

 

before proceeding MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP OF YOUR DATA!!!!

 

will tell you what release is available.

 

will let you update to the new version.

Yeah, at the moment 20.04 isn't listed as a development version of an LTS available for upgrade (that won't be available until July) so isn't automatically listed there, but I can change that. 

 

Thankfully I'm all good on backups (for a change ). Fresh install so all the data has just been transferred across from a backup drive. Easy enough to start again if I have to. 

[Ashleyyyy]

2 minutes ago, MustyStag said:

Yeah, at the moment 20.04 isn't listed as a development version of an LTS available for upgrade (that won't be available until July) so isn't automatically listed there, but I can change that.

really? that command always worked for me on Ubuntu when a new release came out... now granted the last time i daily'd ubuntu was 5 years ago so it might have changed since then...

[Musty]

1 minute ago, Twilight said:

really? that command always worked for me on Ubuntu when a new release came out... now granted the last time i daily'd ubuntu was 5 years ago so it might have changed since then...

It would work that way if I was going from 19 to 20,  but I stick to LTS releases for my work computer so I'm starting from 18.04. 

 

The upgrade path from 18.04 to 20.04 won't officially be available until July, just after the release of 20.04.1. Not sure if that kind of extra delay is normal when upgrading from LTS editions (I've never had new enough hardware for it to matter to me ). I think i remember the switch from 16 to 18 taking about a month?

 

 

[Ashleyyyy]

3 minutes ago, MustyStag said:

It would work that way if I was going from 19 to 20,  but I stick to LTS releases for my work computer so I'm starting from 18.04. 

 

The upgrade path from 18.04 to 20.04 won't officially be available until July, just after the release of 20.04.1. Not sure if that kind of extra delay is normal when upgrading from LTS editions (I've never had new enough hardware for it to matter to me ). I think i remember the switch from 16 to 18 taking about a month?

interesting. yeah, i'm currently 20. when i ran Ubuntu i was 12 to 15, at that age you have no choice but running ancient hardware so i never cared either. now that i have a modern computer i do care though

[Musty]

On 4/28/2020 at 4:53 PM, Twilight said:

interesting. yeah, i'm currently 20. when i ran Ubuntu i was 12 to 15, at that age you have no choice but running ancient hardware so i never cared either. now that i have a modern computer i do care though

 I've been on broken down old laptops until I built this a week or two ago. I ended up upgrading to 20.04 via 19.1 in the end and it resolved most of my issues.

 

Newer problems with my WiFi card on it, but managed to fiddle the grub bootloader settings to fix it so everything is finally running smoothly (fingers crossed!).