Red Hat ARM Engineer Abandons ARM64 Linux Personal Desktop, Goes Back To AMD Ryzen System

Red Hat senior software engineer Marcin Juszkiewicz of Red Hat's ARM Team had been dogfeeding with an AArch64 Linux desktop being used as his primary, personal system for nearly the past year. But now he shared he has gone back to using his AMD Ryzen desktop instead over AArch64 Linux issues encountered with his Ampere Altra desktop.

Marcin shared last June that he was planning for a new development machine and decided to assemble an Ampere Altra AArch64 Linux desktop using the ASRockRack ALTRA8BUD-1L2T paired with an Ampere Altra 80-core CPU and AMD Radeon graphics. He's been blogging in his personal time since about his experience in using this native AArch64 Linux system as his day-to-day personal desktop for development.

But after eleven months of use he decided to end the "experiment" and return to his prior AMD Ryzen desktop. The Ampere Altra system was running fine for his purposes much of the year on Fedora 42 through Fedora 44 with the exception of having to patch his own kernel build each week due to PCI Express controller issues with the Ampere Altra. But even with the 80 Arm64 cores, he found the performance to be lackluster especially for single threaded tasks.

Further leading to ending his ARM64 desktop experience was beginning to hit AMDGPU kernel driver issues on Linux ~7.0+ when video playback and gaming bugs began to appear on ARM64. Marcin then switched to a NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics card with the Nouveau driver while still patching his own kernel builds. But there some software was no longer working due to no proper NVIDIA Flatpak repositories for his setup on AArch64. Namely it's come down to platform issues and hardware-specific quirks/problems of AArch64 Linux desktop usage over fundamental architectural problems.

In the end, the Red Hat ARM engineer decided to go back to x86_64 with his prior AMD Ryzen desktop. Marcin Juszkiewicz concluded his recent blog post summing up the situation with:
"At that point, I gave up. And booted my x86-64 system, which had been powered off all that time. There were a lot of cables to move, some new ones to arrange, and now I have both “wooster” (Ampere Altra) and “puchatek” (Ryzen 5 3600) systems running under my desk.

Moving from 80 cores to 6 cores (12 threads) was a weird experience. A much smaller number, yet things work fine. I can load all threads and the music still plays. All games from my Steam library are playable. A working FreeCAD allows me to finish designing cases for my home projects and I can 3D print prototypes straight from OrcaSlicer.

The “wooster” system stays powered on, churning through RISC-V package builds. It may be weak in single-thread, but it flies when it comes to multi-core load.

Conclusion
As for the Ampere Altra, I am not planning to repeat this experiment. Another AArch64 desktop attempt would require a completely new hardware platform. And I have no plans to spend over twenty thousand PLN to buy an Nvidia DGX Spark system."

An interesting perspective on daily use of AArch64 Linux desktop use by a Red Hat engineer. At least the Ampere Altra hardware investment is working out for him now in re-tasking the box for RISC-V cross-compilation, given the slow performance out of today's RISC-V hardware.

View Original Article