In hoping to ease the experience for Linux enthusiasts and desktop users work through various potential hardware issues when running with AMD Zen (Ryzen) systems on Linux, a new documentation proposal adds a lot of helpers to the Linux kernel documentation area for dealing with different hardware woes.
Proposed for the Linux kernel documentation guide is a debugging document focused on AMD Zen system issues. This is primarily around Ryzen laptops/desktops with suspend/resume and s2idle debugging helpers and other items mostly relevant for the client space. Plus the AMD EPYC server platforms tend to be much better vetted and running solid on Linux given the dominant use there and so this documentation guide mostly of relevance to Ryzen systems.
The documentation authored by AMD Linux engineer Mario Limonciello covers S3 and s2idle topics, other suspend/resume issues like NVMe disk storage disappearing, core offlining problems, spurious IRQs, run-time power management / ASPM / EPP policy, and more. A lot of different possible helpers to guide users should they seek assistance in debugging any hardware woes they may encounter. Of course, ideally the hardware will run just fine under Linux but especially for laptops with some models there are occasional quirks and other issues particularly for the very newest hardware.
The AMD Zen debugging guide documentation proposal can be found via this Linux kernel patch series where it’s now being evaluated.
Related to this is now also being a amd-debug-tools Git repository with some Python scripts for helping to work through AMD P-State, s2idle, and Panel Self Refresh issues.
