AMD 4650GE bugs
File this under the 'just my sorta luck' category.
Well I've been doing development on an OEM machine (to be exact, the
ThinkCentre M75q 2nd Gen) that came out last year.
Immediately I ran into a few issues:
NIC wasn't even recognized in OpenBSD, rendering it useless, okay -
Linux it is then. Going in and benching the performance, I received
initially great results. Games from the past few years run fine and
games from made before 2016 all generally ran well too even on higher
and close to native resolutions.
Games generally aren't that taxing on the CPU these days but I digress.
The major issues came with anything allocating *a lot* of memory.
And these days that's easy. Developers seem to have just given up I guess
on trying to watch out for that, so when everyone is busy running 5
web browsers (this includes your 21st century IRC knockoff and music player)
that makes quite a dent in resource usage.
Anyway I'd find myself finding hard-freezes - often. Once a day.
It would result in lost time and more importantly lost work.
I'd been *trying* everything the past few months, from massaging kernel
variables to following peoples hopeless bug reports (I am not the only one)
but it seems no one can really be assed to look into it.
This seems to be one of those CPU-GPU OEM combo chips that were dumped,
got poor Linux support and were just forgotten about. Gee thanks.
Anyway, THERE ARE GOOD THINGS too. I've gotten a workaround for my freezes
and the answer MAY surprise you! It's a killer.
Yup, that's literally it. I'm using earlyoom to kill applications that use
too much memory because the builtin oom won't work.
https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom
1.7k stars on GitHub(TM) don't lie, kid: this is a great hack.
Or, perhaps I just need to invest in some more RAM.
Let's look at how much 32 GB will cost me- *stares*
Oh... yeah earlyoom will have to do for now.
So immediately you'll think to yourself that there's other things I could
have tried, that I'm just... wrong. I mean if you want we can trade your time
versus the time I spent the first few months tinkering with kernel flags
and figuring out if my BIOS settings had to be aligned with some constellation.
So of course, there's the question: Do games stil run?
Yes, of course. It's just that they'll crash and remind me that there's some-
thing else, mostly hidden, still running eating resources.
One day it seems that Signal-desktop had like some Electron leak or something
so I shut the damn thing off and boom, could play everything fine.
It's better than a hard-freeze where I have to _force_ shut down the shiny
new machine and hope nothing gets lost, the bluetooth module gets de-initialized
properly (or else Linux will show NO adapters - COOL!) and aaaaaaAAAAAAAAAA
I've been using this solution for the past 2 months with no hard-freezes.
TLDR: earlyoom is a life-saver
- Marco