10 ms·

AMD Is Currently Hiring More Linux Engineers

266 points by thg 6y ago

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
Anyone know AMD's plans for remote work? I'd love to apply for some of their positions, but I'm strongly tied to my local community in New England.
- stsmwg 6y ago
  I interviewed a few months ago for a HW position and they mentioned remote was fine, even post-COVID. I'd imagine SW would be more flexible but don't specifically know.
razzm256 6y ago
Good for them. In our company we're buying descrete AMD cards for our workstations particularly because of OSS drivers.
- account42 6y ago
  Interestingly they seem to have been optimizing the OSS driver for workstation uses lately where before the focus was on desktop/gaming applications only while the recommendation was to use amdgpu-pro for workstations. [0] [0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-21.1-More-SPECviewperf https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-21....
azalemeth 6y ago
My current workstation is a dual-Xeon Gold 6252 with 1 TiB of ram. The next one will be either Threadripper Pro or Epyc. AMD have just knocked it out of the park; I want to reward them.
- stepbeek 6y ago
  Damn. What are you working on that needs such a powerful machine?
  - glouwbug 6y ago
    Electron apps
    - emilsedgh 6y ago
      You know I have so much mixed feelings about Electron apps. One one had, the performance really sucks. On the other, there's no way we would've had Spotify, Slack, Teams, and all these big apps supported on Linux.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        In my experience, the performance of Electron Apps is even worse than WINE.
        PlaneSploit 6y ago
        I second this. WINE is fast in comparison.
        spijdar 6y ago
        Wine Is Not an Emulator ;-) But seriously -- wine should have equal performance to running a program "natively" on windows because it essentially is running the program natively, just with different system DLLs that call back to the linux kernel instead of the NT executive. Their implementation may be slightly slower in places, but it's not a problem inherent to Wine itself, and could always be fixed. I know there's a stigma against running win32 apps on linux, and possibly rightly so, but there really isn't a reason why Wine couldn't be a legitimate runtime environment for linux. You can make 100% open source software that targets Wine, and never needs to use or link to proprietary software. Wine has even been ported to architectures where there have never been native windows ports, like the ppc64le port of Wine. (Wine/win32's binary interface is also easier to intercept and automatically translate/emulate calls for non-native architectures, which is the basis of WoW64 and x86 on ARM emulation, and in Wine land, projects like Hangover https://github.com/AndreRH/hangover https://github.com/AndreRH/hangover )
api 6y ago
If laptops are following phones and tablets into ARM it means x64 is most likely to survive on large workstations, servers, HPC, and in data centers. It makes a ton of sense for AMD and Intel to prioritize Linux and make sure their support is first class.
- bee_rider 6y ago
  In HPC the situation seems a little weird. Fundamentally, lots of HPC workloads should scale pretty well to lots of little ARM cores. If anything the x86 advantage is more that it is just a conservative field full of scientists and engineers, who are happy with their old math libraries, which grew up on x86 and are heavily tuned for the environment. If I were AMD or Intel, I'd keep investing in HPC, but be terrified that my lead there was just one good ARM BLAS library away from evaporating.
  - my123 6y ago
    Fujitsu A64fx already exists, the threat is quite near. Arm on the server market is quite interesting too (Graviton2 and Ampere Altra today). And those are big cores. For a ton of little cores, looks less clear-cut for me because of the communication overhead. (could work out though, but won't be exactly easy).
    - pimeys 6y ago
      Does any of these ARM systems work with a mainline kernel, or do they need some old custom kernel with binary blobs?
      - my123 6y ago
        All server-class Arm hardware works with UEFI + ACPI, as such using regular OS images. (mandated by Arm ServerReady SR/SBSA, you are not allowed to ship Device Tree there)
        pimeys 6y ago
vmchale 6y ago
Makes sense!
shaicoleman 6y ago
I really hope they hire more people to work on the Linux GPU drivers, and have the drivers ready and stable on launch, and not years later. I've experienced the following issues on my laptop (Dell G5 SE): * Crashes on suspend/resume. [1] * Kernel warning on boot [2] * It crashes for me without amdgpu.runpm=0 kernel config [3] (fixed?) * Crashes when inserting and removing USB-C monitor (fixed?) * The onboard GPU works, but the dedicated GPU crashes with vsync. (didn't test recently) 1. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1222 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1222 2. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/912 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/912 3. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1304 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1304
- Finnucane 6y ago
  I have also experienced the crash on resume issue. It is only some of the time--like once every few days. But it is still pretty annoying. (currently using kernel 5.8x) It might not be the highest priority for them, but it would be cool if they could fix it.
- nickserv 6y ago
  My driver experience has been overwhelmingly positive, but I do tend to run older (cheaper) chipsets. On my work computer with a Ryzen 7 "Renoir" GPU the problem was not the drivers but the fact that the latest Ubuntu LTS ships with an older kernel, so having to run latest mainline. I have a feeling this sort of situation will become more and more problematic, especially when new architectures are released. Somewhere the Linux community may have to step up for more easily having recent kernels.
  - pedrocr 6y ago
    Ubuntu LTS already has the hardware enablement stack to solve this very issue. You stay on the LTS but get newer kernel/mesa/etc for hardware support.
  - volta83 6y ago
    > I do tend to run older (cheaper) chipsets. The experience of running old hardware on Linux is much better than that of running new hardware. Except for certain products at least (I run latest nvidia compute cards and the drivers just work).
dyingkneepad 6y ago
> Location: Austin, Texas. Meh... Where are the remote jobs? I bet if you open an office in Oregon (where there's tons of Intel Open Source people) you'll find a lot of candidates. Or, you know, act like the old times of 2020 and hire remote employees?
- xkeysc0re 6y ago
  Not to mention Linux itself being developed remotely
- bgorman 6y ago
  If you are developing low-level device drivers, it is nice to be close to the hardware engineers.
  - com2kid 6y ago
    People don't realize how quickly hardware iterates and how many modifications and changes are made on site in the lab. Or just how often development hardware self-bricks and needs to be recovered. Doing hardware work remotely is a lot slower. Possible, but slower. Edit: Or how there is that one person who is really good at assembly and if you can walk down and ask them a question it'll save you a couple hours (days) of debugging. And then there is that one person who is really good with an oscilloscope and while in theory you shouldn't need to have decode messages by sight from waveforms, well, this one person can and it sure is useful time to time....
    - raverbashing 6y ago
      You're right for prototype HW. For things that are "working" already it's usually not needed
    - dyingkneepad 6y ago
      This is not my experience. Driver developers don't use oscilloscopes. Changing HW once the first prototype is done is expensive and it takes a lot of time for you to get the second iteration. Or you flip a bit in the driver to disable the new broken feature. Most of the driver development happens before the physical hardware even exists. Everything is virtual.
xkeysc0re 6y ago
Onsite and local only to Austin, TX, unfortunately
Shorel 6y ago
If it is only for GPU... the drivers are already pretty good. If it is for their Ryzen processors... please hire more. I am thinking about going back to Intel laptops after the pitiful support in the current Linux kernel.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  That’s really useful information, thanks!
- kevincox 6y ago
  As someone in line for a Ryzen process what issues are you seeing? I haven't heard of many issues.
  - Shorel 6y ago
    I have a Ryzen 2500U. Random freezes when I am actually using the laptop are the most common. Infuriating. Scrolling a webpage in Firefox using touchpad gestures is a risky business, more than half of the freezes happen when scrolling. The fact that hibernation and sleep also don't work is just the icing on the cake.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

266 points by thg 6y ago

Anyone know AMD's plans for remote work? I'd love to apply for some of their positions, but I'm strongly tied to my local community in New England.

stsmwg 6y ago
I interviewed a few months ago for a HW position and they mentioned remote was fine, even post-COVID. I'd imagine SW would be more flexible but don't specifically know.

razzm256 6y ago

Good for them. In our company we're buying descrete AMD cards for our workstations particularly because of OSS drivers.

account42 6y ago
Interestingly they seem to have been optimizing the OSS driver for workstation uses lately where before the focus was on desktop/gaming applications only while the recommendation was to use amdgpu-pro for workstations. [0] [0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-21.1-More-SPECviewperf https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-21....

azalemeth 6y ago

My current workstation is a dual-Xeon Gold 6252 with 1 TiB of ram. The next one will be either Threadripper Pro or Epyc. AMD have just knocked it out of the park; I want to reward them.

stepbeek 6y ago
Damn. What are you working on that needs such a powerful machine?
- glouwbug 6y ago
  Electron apps
  - emilsedgh 6y ago
    You know I have so much mixed feelings about Electron apps. One one had, the performance really sucks. On the other, there's no way we would've had Spotify, Slack, Teams, and all these big apps supported on Linux.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      In my experience, the performance of Electron Apps is even worse than WINE.
      - PlaneSploit 6y ago
        I second this. WINE is fast in comparison.
        spijdar 6y ago
        Wine Is Not an Emulator ;-) But seriously -- wine should have equal performance to running a program "natively" on windows because it essentially is running the program natively, just with different system DLLs that call back to the linux kernel instead of the NT executive. Their implementation may be slightly slower in places, but it's not a problem inherent to Wine itself, and could always be fixed. I know there's a stigma against running win32 apps on linux, and possibly rightly so, but there really isn't a reason why Wine couldn't be a legitimate runtime environment for linux. You can make 100% open source software that targets Wine, and never needs to use or link to proprietary software. Wine has even been ported to architectures where there have never been native windows ports, like the ppc64le port of Wine. (Wine/win32's binary interface is also easier to intercept and automatically translate/emulate calls for non-native architectures, which is the basis of WoW64 and x86 on ARM emulation, and in Wine land, projects like Hangover https://github.com/AndreRH/hangover https://github.com/AndreRH/hangover )

api 6y ago

If laptops are following phones and tablets into ARM it means x64 is most likely to survive on large workstations, servers, HPC, and in data centers. It makes a ton of sense for AMD and Intel to prioritize Linux and make sure their support is first class.

bee_rider 6y ago
In HPC the situation seems a little weird. Fundamentally, lots of HPC workloads should scale pretty well to lots of little ARM cores. If anything the x86 advantage is more that it is just a conservative field full of scientists and engineers, who are happy with their old math libraries, which grew up on x86 and are heavily tuned for the environment. If I were AMD or Intel, I'd keep investing in HPC, but be terrified that my lead there was just one good ARM BLAS library away from evaporating.
- my123 6y ago
  Fujitsu A64fx already exists, the threat is quite near. Arm on the server market is quite interesting too (Graviton2 and Ampere Altra today). And those are big cores. For a ton of little cores, looks less clear-cut for me because of the communication overhead. (could work out though, but won't be exactly easy).
  - pimeys 6y ago
    Does any of these ARM systems work with a mainline kernel, or do they need some old custom kernel with binary blobs?
    - my123 6y ago
      All server-class Arm hardware works with UEFI + ACPI, as such using regular OS images. (mandated by Arm ServerReady SR/SBSA, you are not allowed to ship Device Tree there)
      - pimeys 6y ago

vmchale 6y ago

Makes sense!

shaicoleman 6y ago

I really hope they hire more people to work on the Linux GPU drivers, and have the drivers ready and stable on launch, and not years later. I've experienced the following issues on my laptop (Dell G5 SE): * Crashes on suspend/resume. [1] * Kernel warning on boot [2] * It crashes for me without amdgpu.runpm=0 kernel config [3] (fixed?) * Crashes when inserting and removing USB-C monitor (fixed?) * The onboard GPU works, but the dedicated GPU crashes with vsync. (didn't test recently) 1. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1222 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1222 2. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/912 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/912 3. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1304 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1304

Finnucane 6y ago
I have also experienced the crash on resume issue. It is only some of the time--like once every few days. But it is still pretty annoying. (currently using kernel 5.8x) It might not be the highest priority for them, but it would be cool if they could fix it.
nickserv 6y ago
My driver experience has been overwhelmingly positive, but I do tend to run older (cheaper) chipsets. On my work computer with a Ryzen 7 "Renoir" GPU the problem was not the drivers but the fact that the latest Ubuntu LTS ships with an older kernel, so having to run latest mainline. I have a feeling this sort of situation will become more and more problematic, especially when new architectures are released. Somewhere the Linux community may have to step up for more easily having recent kernels.
- pedrocr 6y ago
  Ubuntu LTS already has the hardware enablement stack to solve this very issue. You stay on the LTS but get newer kernel/mesa/etc for hardware support.
- volta83 6y ago
  > I do tend to run older (cheaper) chipsets. The experience of running old hardware on Linux is much better than that of running new hardware. Except for certain products at least (I run latest nvidia compute cards and the drivers just work).

dyingkneepad 6y ago

> Location: Austin, Texas. Meh... Where are the remote jobs? I bet if you open an office in Oregon (where there's tons of Intel Open Source people) you'll find a lot of candidates. Or, you know, act like the old times of 2020 and hire remote employees?

xkeysc0re 6y ago
Not to mention Linux itself being developed remotely
bgorman 6y ago
If you are developing low-level device drivers, it is nice to be close to the hardware engineers.
- com2kid 6y ago
  People don't realize how quickly hardware iterates and how many modifications and changes are made on site in the lab. Or just how often development hardware self-bricks and needs to be recovered. Doing hardware work remotely is a lot slower. Possible, but slower. Edit: Or how there is that one person who is really good at assembly and if you can walk down and ask them a question it'll save you a couple hours (days) of debugging. And then there is that one person who is really good with an oscilloscope and while in theory you shouldn't need to have decode messages by sight from waveforms, well, this one person can and it sure is useful time to time....
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    You're right for prototype HW. For things that are "working" already it's usually not needed
  - dyingkneepad 6y ago
    This is not my experience. Driver developers don't use oscilloscopes. Changing HW once the first prototype is done is expensive and it takes a lot of time for you to get the second iteration. Or you flip a bit in the driver to disable the new broken feature. Most of the driver development happens before the physical hardware even exists. Everything is virtual.

xkeysc0re 6y ago

Onsite and local only to Austin, TX, unfortunately

Shorel 6y ago

If it is only for GPU... the drivers are already pretty good. If it is for their Ryzen processors... please hire more. I am thinking about going back to Intel laptops after the pitiful support in the current Linux kernel.

andy_ppp 6y ago
That’s really useful information, thanks!
kevincox 6y ago
As someone in line for a Ryzen process what issues are you seeing? I haven't heard of many issues.
- Shorel 6y ago
  I have a Ryzen 2500U. Random freezes when I am actually using the laptop are the most common. Infuriating. Scrolling a webpage in Firefox using touchpad gestures is a risky business, more than half of the freezes happen when scrolling. The fact that hibernation and sleep also don't work is just the icing on the cake.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]