3mo ago

0 days since last faild attempt at AMD drivers

well, today i (partially) realized why my basic drivers don't work: the preinstalled packages amdgpu and amdgpu-dkms seem to not work due to amdgpu-dkms being unconfigured. tried configuring it and got the same error. around about there my system stopped using even the iGPU and i had to uninstall some other drivers (thanks @lena@gregtech.eu )

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AMD drivers are plug n play? They are part of mesa and you don't need to do anything, why would you need to install anything else?
Edit: except rocm
- Rocm unfortunately.
  
  ROCM is well supported by docker PCI passthrough with official packages. So much better than polluting your workstation and maintaining the stack
  
  Don't they support like 3 cards?
  
  Rocm usually needs an override line in pip wheel/python, not the driver itself at least from my experience
- Unfortunately they workn't. :(
- real rocm moment
Which distro are you using? AMD has been completely plug-and-play for me.
- My R9 390 was a huge pain in the ass to get working on any distro, but I think it was the last card before they fixed whatever issue it was.
  
  Yeah, afaik it's exactly one of the cards that require manual intervention or a switch to the radeon driver. Bad generation to run on Linux.
- Kbuntu 22.04 w/ radeon R9 M360
  
  Have you enabled Southern Islands support as a kernel parameter? Your generation of GPU was originally supported on radeon, so you need to explicitly enable SI (Southern Islands) support to use amdgpu.
  See ArchWiki for more information
As a relative Linux noob and Nvidia card owner, I keep hearing how it'll be so much easier if I go AMD. Is that not true?
- You typically only have issues if you want to use a newly released card with a distro that doesn't run a recent kernel or if you want to use GPU compute.
  
  Can confirm:
  When I bought an RX Vega 56 on launch day seven years ago and installed it the same day, I had to go with the proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver (on Kubuntu) because the Free drivers didn't support it yet.
  When I bought an RX 9070 XT on launch day two months ago but took a few weeks to install it (because it was wider than my old Vega I had to get a different case, which I spent a little while deciding on), I had to upgrade to the actual latest mainline kernel instead of the one Kubuntu shipped with, but then it "just worked" without any proprietary drivers. (The same would've been true had I installed it immediately on launch day as 6.13.5, which added support for it, came out before the card was released.)
  Of course, it suddenly occurs to me upon reading this thread that I haven't tried the new card out with GPGPU or LLM-type stuff yet, and since I'm not using the proprietary driver this time I guess I still need to install ROCm. Oops, LOL.
- It is. OP is just using an old-ass card from many years ago.
- Generally yes, if you use any modern card. Older ones might require to switch to an older driver (before "amdgpu" there was one called "radeon", by default any distro I know comes with the modern amdgpu). There are also two AMD GPU generations (I think HD7000/Rx 200 and Rx 300) that can be a little bit nasty as the driver change happened around that time, those sometimes need manual intervention.
  Anything newer (RX 550 and higher) pretty much always work without any hitch or additional steps required.
- It is true and has been my experience for the last decade or so. Unfortunately, OP is trying to use a GPU from 2015 that's still based on GCN 1.0 with the newer amdgpu driver stack, which is not officially supported. Effectively, OP is getting a taste of what it was like before AMD started pouring ressources into their open source GPU drivers.
- AMD used to be a huge pain in the ass to get working, but that hasn't been true for a while now.
- No AMD is fine. You pretty much never need to install anything to get full performance from it, not sure what OP is up to maybe ROCm which is like, AI-related stuff. Not something most people need.
- AMD is much MUCH better to set up, I have an AMD laptop and setup for drivers is just adding amdgpu to the boot flags (NixOS btw), for Nvidia on my main pc I had to go to hell and back to get it mostly working and even then Zed sometimes causes my kernel to panic (But I'm not 100% sure if it's because of the Nvidia drivers)
- Yeah, I think I just got unlucky with the drivers.
- Ive had no issues, nvidias just better when it comes to actual software support, like for blender, amd works mostly fine for me on cachyos, hip rt crashes blender tho. All of my steam games run fine. I did have to reinstall my os after messing stuff up setting up qemu, attaching my gpu as a device did not go correctly and when I removed qemu through the terminal (black screen) it stayed stuck on my integrated gpu and couldn't recognize the seperate one anymoere. Only issue ive really had, wont try to set up a windows virtual desktop again.
  
  nvidias just better when it comes to actual software support
  Lol no.
- I can guarantee you'll get more bang for your buck going with Nvidia just due to the fact that so much compute software requires cuda (blender, machine learning, any sort of engineering simulation software). Nvidia drivers are just less of a pain to deal with as a developer, since they're less strict on error handling and syntax.
  You can get a 3050 on amazon for like $150 now, which is more than enough for most games.
  Plus DLSS is still miles ahead of FSR in terms of quality and efficiency.
  
  Interesting! Well I currently have a 1070ti, which the internet tells me will mostly outperform a 3050. Thanks for your dev perspective.
I've been happily running the mesa-dev stack (mesa-tkg-git from the chaotic-aur repo) both on semi-current hardware (an RX 6600 that's sidelined by a bad fan atm) and somewhat older hardware (the Vega 56 I'm using as a backup because it's my second best card after the RX 6600) for a while now so I don't know what you're doing.
- well, apparently the R9 M3xx is the problematic one
  
  That's odd given GCN1 and 2 will fully work in Linux with a compatibility toggle to enable AMDGPU support set in the kernel parameters, and GCN3 and newer natively supports AMDGPU without that toggle being required.
sudo pacman -Sy mesa vulkan-radeon (or smth like that)
Edit: Yeah, I know, Syu. I very rarely not do Syu. But /usr/bin/brain segfaulted while trying to be smart.
- -Sy is recommended against. -S or -Syu, but not -Sy
  
  Can I ask why? I’m newer to Arch and I legit don’t know.
  
  Yeah, only thought that halfway through lol
- @30p87 @Fortatech enjoy ur broken system after partial update
fixed
I had to install a pacman package and change a config so my system would use vulkan instead of opengl. Other than that, nothing should be needed.
I dealt with this at work recently with an HP laptop...lots of trial and error. It was honestly a miracle that ssh had been setup before updating but otherwise never would have been able to keep picking at it. Gave up eventually but that sucked.
Is this even an issue anymore? I guess it might depend on what distro you're using, but I'm using mint and shit's running flawlessly on modern amd hardware.

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