@maya_b @mntmn y'all don't wanna do an altra workstation, the pcie on those is totally busted which means gpu support is just bad and super unstable (source: i have an altra workstation and i maintain downstream kernel patches, https://github.com/chimera-linux/cports/blob/master/main/linux-stable/patches/9001-ampere-arm64-Add-a-fixup-handler-for-alignment-fault.patch and https://github.com/chimera-linux/cports/blob/master/main/linux-stable/patches/9002-ampere-arm64-Work-around-Ampere-Altra-erratum-82288-.patch ), the only gpus that work fairly reasonably (but not completely) are the intel ones and they will never fully work upstream without patches

this is not fixed until ampereone, and since it's a hardware bug you'd be shipping buggy hw forever

@q66 @maya_b ah, big meh! so this is fixed in ampereone?

@mntmn @maya_b i think so; altra max has the same thing (i confirmed it with someone some weeks back) but i believe ampereone is brand new

ofc, it's not available to mortals yet so we won't know for sure for a while

@maya_b @mntmn yeah, though the least expensive sku for that should be beefier than the best one for regular altra, so at least that's somewhat appropriate

but if they messed up the pcie again i won't be amused

@q66 @maya_b @mntmn Ditto on Ampere Altra: Save your time and sanity. It's not worth it.

@elly @q66 @maya_b so disappointing, but thanks for pointing out these issues. boggles the mind how this could be so messed up... i guess we have to wait for an ampereone HPC module then?

@mntmn @elly @maya_b it's a shame because other than this it's an excellent system, with great power efficiency and performance

but if gpus are problematic then it makes a bad workstation (if you do not apply the patches you will get noise in display, if you do you get somewhat slower performance and amdgpu is broken since 6.9 and before then it worked ish but had broken vulkan, funnily what works is nvidia with proprietary drivers with no patches, but you don't want that)