Current state Red Hat Enterprise on AMD Ryzen 7

[Essence_of_Darkness]

Hi,

today I am getting new Ryzen system for high school and I just wanna know current state of Red Hat's compatibility with AMD Ryzen system's cause I don't wanna use Windows (It will be only in VM for gaming) and if compatibility is bad are there any better alternatives ?

Also if you can help me finish my build the other topic is here : Link

[grimreeper132]

I believe so 

 

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-CodeXL-2.3

[Faugh]

Why do you want to use RHEL? It is a commercial Linux distro (you have to pay for the license) targeted at large enterprises, mainly for server use. It can be used on a workstation, but I doubt it will be a great desktop experience. In general it has support for Ryzen, if you use recent kernel versions, though.

What kind of experience do you have with Linux already?

 

11 hours ago, Essence_of_Darkness said:

...cause I don't wanna use Windows (It will be only in VM for gaming) and if compatibility is bad are there any better alternatives ?

Are you planning to have two GPUs in your system? Because you will need to pass through your GPU to the windows VM and it won't be available to your main OS anymore then. Also you need to have an extra monitor or swap the cable every time you want to use your Windows environment. I think there was an LTT or TQ video on this topic a while back, but can't find it at the moment...

 

For better alternatives:

In terms of Linux distro I really like arch linux, but it requires a lot of Linux knowledge. Manjaro is archlinux based, and probably easier to install - I haven't used it though.

If you want a nice out of the box Linux desktop most Ubuntu variants would probably be fine. If you like the RHEL flavour of Linux you would probably want CentOS.

For gaming, I personally would go for a dual boot setup. I know it sucks to reboot every time, but with fast SSD boot times nowadays it not as much a problem as it used to be. I've been trough all variants of gaming on Linux and from my experience everything else - be it Virtualization or using Wine/Crossover/... will get frustrating at some point, when something does not work.

[Essence_of_Darkness]

2 minutes ago, Faugh said:

Why do you want to use RHEL? It is a commercial Linux distro (you have to pay for the license) targeted at large enterprises, mainly for server use. It can be used on a workstation, but I doubt it will be a great desktop experience. In general it has support for Ryzen, if you use recent kernel versions, though.

What kind of experience do you have with Linux already?

 

Are you planning to have two GPUs in your system? Because you will need to pass through your GPU to the windows VM and it won't be available to your main OS anymore then. Also you need to have an extra monitor or swap the cable every time you want to use your Windows environment. I think there was an LTT or TQ video on this topic a while back, but can't find it at the moment...

 

For better alternatives:

In terms of Linux distro I really like arch linux, but it requires a lot of Linux knowledge. Manjaro is archlinux based, and probably easier to install - I haven't used it though.

If you want a nice out of the box Linux desktop most Ubuntu variants would probably be fine. If you like the RHEL flavour of Linux you would probably want CentOS.

For gaming, I personally would go for a dual boot setup. I know it sucks to reboot every time, but with fast SSD boot times nowadays it not as much a problem as it used to be. I've been trough all variants of gaming on Linux and from my experience everything else - be it Virtualization or using Wine/Crossover/... will get frustrating at some point, when something does not work.

I will have my R7 260X in new system for host OS and I have FreeSync display for my Windows VM and I have some old LG 1680x1050 monitor for host OS. I've grown up Red Hat Enterprise cause my dad uses it and has access for free. I've had my Phenom 1055T with 12 GB of RAM and GTX 690 (Gaming VM) and R7 260X for years without problems up and running. The reason is RHEL is amount knowledge and experience I have on that OS. Will Ubuntu be better cause I have freaking tone of video editing, photo editing, CAD, virtualization for my high school (I just started the high school and they already say half of our "harem" (18 girls and 5 boys including me) class needs new systems cause we are mostly Athlon or Phenom)

[Essence_of_Darkness]

8 minutes ago, Faugh said:

 

For gaming, I personally would go for a dual boot setup. I know it sucks to reboot every time, but with fast SSD boot times nowadays it not as much a problem as it used to be. I've been trough all variants of gaming on Linux and from my experience everything else - be it Virtualization or using Wine/Crossover/... will get frustrating at some point, when something does not work.

I have 2 SSD's (One for OS and one imported in VM) so thats not problem and I don't want dual boot cause my father tried with his Xeon machine and kept crashing without any reason and it was very unstable.

[Faugh]

It was not quite clear from your initial post, what your past experience with these topics looks like. I just found it a bit odd to use an enterprise grade commercial distro for home/school use.  The point with ubuntu is, that it's more optimized towards a desktop use - it is very different from RHEL though concerning config file locations, administration utilities, etc.. If you feel at home with the desktop environment RHEL provides, you should probably just stick with it.

 

As for dual boot setup: For me, simply running the OS natively on the hardware, which is what it was developed for in the first place, is usually the least hassle. It's basically two completely separate OS environments, that can use the full potential of the hardware, with no layer in between which could cause problems. I don't see why it should be unstable once you get the disk setup and boot loader configured correctly.

Anyway - as it seems to me, that you are familiar and happy with the requirements, advantages and drawbacks of a virtualized setup already - just go for it.

[Essence_of_Darkness]

2 minutes ago, Faugh said:

It was not quite clear from your initial post, what your past experience with these topics looks like. I just found it a bit odd to use an enterprise grade commercial distro for home/school use.  The point with ubuntu is, that it's more optimized towards a desktop use - it is very different from RHEL though concerning config file locations, administration utilities, etc.. If you feel at home with the desktop environment RHEL provides, you should probably just stick with it.

 

As for dual boot setup: For me, simply running the OS natively on the hardware, which is what it was developed for in the first place, is usually the least hassle. It's basically two completely separate OS environments, that can use the full potential of the hardware, with no layer in between which could cause problems. I don't see why it should be unstable once you get the disk setup and boot loader configured correctly.

Anyway - as it seems to me, that you are familiar and happy with the requirements, advantages and drawbacks of a virtualized setup already - just go for it.

A lot of people think its wierd but I've been learning that OS since kindergarten. I am very familiar with advantages but only draw back is 2 seperate gpu's which are actually not a problem. I've seen how bad it works on my dad's Xeon machine cause I am using it ATM due to local stores being closed today which drew me back from buying a new system. And also on his machine it was pretty unstable which I mentioned in the previous post and it kept crashing for some reason cause he wanted to game on it (He has RX Vega 56). I am using atm RHEL 5.5 and I see that there are some noticeable changes on RHEL 7.

[Filthyscum]

Get Fedora (https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/articles/relationship-between-fedora-and-rhel), you will need bleeding edge kernels and so on for passthrough, VMs and AMD Ryzen.

 

In fact, at this time you will need to patch your kernel to get useable performance from an AMD processor in VM-PT scenarios due to a bug with npt in KVM. 

 

A Ryzen 7 1700 would be really good for a KVM/QEMU Windows 10 VM. 

 

After you patch your kernel, enable SVM and IOMMU in bios, it´s a "breeze" to set up in Fedora (sudo dnf update, sudo dnf install @virtualization. Level1techs.com has lots of resources on youtube and on their forums).

 

Some reading material:

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/patch-npt-on-ryzen-for-better-performance-level-one-techs/120816

https://level1techs.com/article/ryzen-gpu-passthrough-setup-guide-fedora-26-windows-gaming-linux