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fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,421  

AMDGPU-PRO 20.10 on Devuan Beowulf with an AMD RX5600

From nemo in #devuan on freenode irc:

AMDGPU-PRO 20.10 on Devuan Beowulf with an AMD RX5600

The fundamental problem is that the open source drivers, even in Beowulf Backports do not appear to yet support this released card. AMD *does* have a closed source driver for Debian. It has a few gotchas however that I'll try to document here.

The first is that their installer checks for a "legit" debian based distro. For them, that's an ID of debian, mint, or ubuntu (this was an improvement over 16.40 that only supported ubuntu). Adding |devuan to the amdgpu-install script in the os_release() section is fairly trivial.

Once that's done, the install proceeds smoothly. It creates a new file repo for the .debs it installed.

The problems start if you attempt to reboot. The symptoms I experienced were that the AMDGPU-PRO 20.10 appears to use a Video ABI of 23 (this is visible on stderr if you startx) and causes crashes in Xorg (visible in log) causing fallback in Xorg and an endless flickering loop probably 'cause kernel has wildly different stuff loaded.

The only fix I could find was to downgrade Xorg from 1.20 to 1.19 to match the video ABI. ascii-xorg.pref does this. You just toss it into your /etc/apt/preferences.d, append deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged ascii main non-free contrib sources.list, and update/upgrade.

The downside. Two meta packages, task-desktop and task-mate-desktop that I had installed (and probably related desktop metas) seem to force depend on 1.20 for some reason (why, no idea - you'd think that'd be a lower dependency if necessary) and have to be removed. This *will* confuse apt autoremove. In my case I was able to manage things by explicitly installing libreoffice.

Once you've done that and rebooted, everything seems to work fine! Graphics are working beautifully, and I assume the pro package lets me play around with ML/opencl stuff too, but haven't tried that yet.

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: London

Registered: 2019-03-24

Posts: 3,125  

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Re: AMDGPU-PRO 20.10 on Devuan Beowulf with an AMD RX5600

The fundamental problem is that the open source drivers, even in Beowulf Backports do not appear to yet support this released card.

Are you sure it's not a firmware issue? Debian haven't updated the AMD firmware since July last year so Navi & Renoir cards aren't supported. Check if the amdgpu kernel module is loaded, if it is then the card is supported but the firmware is missing (grep dmesg for 'firmware').

The firmware can be grabbed from upstream: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=721727#p721727

AMD *does* have a closed source driver for Debian.

Performance under the AMDGPU-PRO driver is inferior compared to the open source version and AMD themselves do not recommend it except for their Pro-series video cards: https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/relea … stallation

EDIT: the card is definitely supported by the open source amdgpu driver: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= … bios&num=1

MX Linux have packaged up the Ubuntu firmware, it should be compatible with Devuan: http://mxrepo.com/mx/repo/pool/ahs/l/linux-firmware/

Last edited by Head_on_a_Stick (2020-06-04 17:03:56)

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rolfie

Member

Registered: 2017-11-25

Posts: 1,055  

Re: AMDGPU-PRO 20.10 on Devuan Beowulf with an AMD RX5600

@fsmithred: have a look at these two threads:
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=3461 and https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=3358.

Got an AMD RX5500 working with Beowulf/EFI/Mate/5.5 kernel from backports. I used the way to load the firmware as described in the linked bugreport, and an update-initramsfs past that, and it worked.

Try it with your RX5600, rolfie

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,421  

Re: AMDGPU-PRO 20.10 on Devuan Beowulf with an AMD RX5600

I'm not really on this thread.

rolfie

Member

Registered: 2017-11-25

Posts: 1,055  

Re: AMDGPU-PRO 20.10 on Devuan Beowulf with an AMD RX5600

@fsmithred: I am sorry, looks like I need to explain where I am coming from.

You posted a thread about support for a RX5600 with the PRO driver package. HOAS answered that there is a way without this driver. I just wanted to confirm that I managed to get a RX5500 working without this driver which uses a chipset out of the same family. Navi10 and Navi14 should behave similar. Both threads linked naturally show all the detours, dead ends and uturns taken.

If desirable I could try to condense that to what is really required (as far as I remember. Slowly getting old...).

rolfie

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,421  

Re: AMDGPU-PRO 20.10 on Devuan Beowulf with an AMD RX5600

A condensed version with the essentials is always good, especially when I don't have to do it. Thanks.

rolfie

Member

Registered: 2017-11-25

Posts: 1,055  

Re: AMDGPU-PRO 20.10 on Devuan Beowulf with an AMD RX5600

Making a NAVI based GPU work under Beowulf without the PRO driver

The latest AMD GPUs like an RX5300, RX5500, RX5600 or RX5700 require a kernel >= 5.4 and latest firmware to support NAVI10 re. NAVI14 chipsets. Suitable kernels are available in backports. The latest firmware available in the Debian/Devuan repos across all suites is dated 2019-07-17 which is too old. Special action is required.

Install Beowulf at least to command line level. Myself had the privilegue to have an older AMD GPU around which I used to install a full graphical desktop, in my case Lightdm/Mate.

All commands need to be run as root.

To be able to install a new kernel add this line to your sources.list:

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-backports main contrib non-free

Then run

# apt update
# apt list linux-image-5.*

or

# apt list linux-image-5.5*

Currently you may find 5.4.0-0.bpo.2, 5.4.0-0.bpo.3, 5.4.0-0.bpo.4 and 5.5.0-0.bpo.2 kernels in backports. This may change over time. Install:

# apt install linux-image-5.5.0-0.bpo.2-amd64

Get the latest firmware from the linux kernel pages on github and copy it to the right place:

# apt install git
# cd /tmp
# git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git
# cd linux-firmware/
# cp -va amdgpu/ /lib/firmware/

This update of the initramfs is very important.

# update-initramfs -u
# reboot

Enjoy your new graphics.

rolfie