Hi guys! Brand new PC…And I’m trying to install its brand new 7800XT. I’ve chosen KDE Neon, as it was my previous OS, and I’ve grown to like it. I’d like to stick with it if possible…I’m writing this preamble, because when I try to run amdgpu-install from the AMD downloads page, all I get is:
Unsupported OS: /etc/os-release ID 'neon'
So…what can I do? Neon is mostly Ubuntu 22.04 to most effects. Kernel is 6.2.0-36-generic.
Thanks!
Sigh…Just for the sake of it…It needed to recompile the kernel with the LATEST firmware you needed to download manually. Instructions here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1451506/how-to-make-ubuntu-22-04-work-with-a-radeon-rx-7900-xtx
I changed the file download to the latest, which at this moment is linux-firmware-20231111.tar.gz. After the update-initramfs, reboot (since I already ran the PPA earlier…to no avail), and this time it worked, and it immediately showed me the second monitor, which had been dead for the last couple of hours since I started fighting this thing.
As others have said “Ya doin it wrong!”
AMD has the AMDGPU kernel driver already in place in the linux kernel, and excluding the newest generations of cards for about a month or two after they come out, that part should work fine. Additionally, you need Mesa installed for the userspace drivers. It is typically preinstalled and covers the OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for your card.
Pretty much the only time you want to run the driver from AMD’s site is if you’re using some particular professional applications, otherwise Mesa tends to outperform it. There are relatively few games that AMDVLK (the AMD official open source Vulkan driver) is ahead, and it’s got an edge in most (all?) raytracing cases currently.
Lastly, the reason it doesn’t work is because the driver install script is checking your os-release version to see if it matches the Ubuntu version it was packaged for. If you’re confident that you can fix any problems that arise from doing this, you could presumably just change the string in /etc/os-release to match what it’s looking for. I don’t recommend doing this, though, unless you don’t care if the drivers break things because they weren’t packaged for the release you’re using.
AMD has the AMDGPU kernel driver already in place in the linux kernel, and excluding the newest generations of cards for about a month or two after they come out, that part should work fine.
Reading his comment, it looks like KDE Neon ships with a two-year-old kernel, so I assume that that’s the issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_neon
20230706, based on Ubuntu 22.04 and Plasma 5.26.5, kernel Linux 5.15 / 6 July 2023
Linux 5.15 came out in October 2021, and his card was just released.
Thanks. I wasn’t aware of the difference privative vs public ones on AMD. On Nvidia (where I came from) it’s kinda the opposite, noveau kinda works, but if you really want to play with proper performance, you should head for the privative one. In the end it was just easier to download the AMD firmware from the latest linux release, and recompile with that. It worked after that.
If you were missing firmware, that’s not actually a driver issue. You do need the firmware and (unless you also installed the professional drivers as well) you should be all good now and using the full open source stack.
Anyway, glad to hear it’s working for you!
Yeah…kinda. Now on multi-monitor setup I have a weird glitch…when one of the monitors are turned off. Screen will start flickering rearranging the windows. Weird.
Do you mean it constantly does it when a monitor is turned off or that when you initially turn off a monitor, it rearranges all windows to fit on the remaining monitor.
If the first, I’m not sure what the problem might be, but the second is pretty normal, I think. The card sees that the display was detached and moves your windows to the attached display so you can see them.
…the first, I’m afraid. It continues to jump the windows out of place, about 3 times within 2 seconds, every 20 seconds or so…
IIRC, the drivers I needed were already in base Debian.
Is it not working out-of-box on your distro?
Once upon a time, they had proprietary drivers that you needed to download separately, but I don’t believe that that’s the situation today.
EDIT: Yeah, according to this, it’s all in the vanilla kernel now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMDgpu_(Linux_kernel_module)
You can go download their stuff if you want the absolute latest or something, but unless I had some kind of problem with the driver my distro shipped, I probably wouldn’t bother.
I also have a 7800 XT and use Debian. I had to download firmware from git.kernel.org, as not even the package in unstable is new enough: stable has 2023-02-10, unstable currently has 2023-05-15, while 7800 XT (and 7700 XT) needs 2023-08-04 or newer At least bookworm-backports has a new enough kernel now. (6.5, IIRC 6.4 is the minimum.)
But to get ROCm working, I ended up adding AMD repositories and using its drivers with the 6.1 kernel from stable.