AMD Unleashes Initial AMDGPU Driver Support For GCN 1.0 / Southern Islands GPUs

[Wielkie G]

Is this what I should be looking for for my 2013 Mac Pro?

It comes with two Firepro D300 cards, which seem to be rebranded W7000 cards with half the RAM (2 GB instead of 4). Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 booted nicely after I put nomodeset in the kernel line, but it runs using LLVMPIPE.

From what I gather for now I should go back to 14.04 and the fglrx driver, but if AMDGPU support is close, I'd rather hold out and try this.

Can anyone shed some light on what I'd need to do to get this running? I guess actually using the two cards will be out of the question?

It looks like Pitcairn. It should work using radeon.ko/libdrm_radeon and radeonsi, unless the pciids are missing.

[bridgman]

Is this what I should be looking for for my 2013 Mac Pro?

It comes with two Firepro D300 cards, which seem to be rebranded W7000 cards with half the RAM (2 GB instead of 4). Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 booted nicely after I put nomodeset in the kernel line, but it runs using LLVMPIPE.

From what I gather for now I should go back to 14.04 and the fglrx driver, but if AMDGPU support is close, I'd rather hold out and try this.

Can anyone shed some light on what I'd need to do to get this running? I guess actually using the two cards will be out of the question?

The code is still under development, not ready for end users yet, so options are basically (a) help with development (getting it working with Glamor seems to be next step) or (b) stay with radeon or fglrx for now.

[dammarin]

Thank you for your answers. Here's the output of lspci -nn:

02:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Curacao XT [Radeon R7 370 / R9 270X/370 OEM] [1002:6810]
02:00.1 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cape Verde/Pitcairn HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 7700/7800 Series] [1002:aab0]
06:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Curacao XT [Radeon R7 370 / R9 270X/370 OEM] [1002:6810]
06:00.1 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cape Verde/Pitcairn HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 7700/7800 Series] [1002:aab0]

The radeon module throws up a bunch of modesetting and UMS errors during boot, but I guess they're the result of nomodeset I put in GRUB.

I wish I could help with development, alas I'm unskilled. Maybe at my next career change :-)

[bridgman]

Is there a reason you are using nomodeset ? AFAIK support for all of the recent GPUs requires kernel modesetting.

[dammarin]

Ubuntu doesn't boot otherwise. I now tried booting 14.04 without nomodeset and all I get is:

radeon 0000:02:00.0: radeon_vce: Can't load firmware "radeon/TAHITI_vce.bin"
radeon 0000:02:00.0: VCE init error (-22).

[haagch]

Common sense says that supporting old laptops with hybrid graphics is not a top priority of Amd.

Well, I would hope that the dma-buf infrastructure for amdgpu already works and it'd be simple to hook the SI driver up to it, once it works, of course.

I would disable the weaker gpu via bios or linux kernel pci interface.

Then I don't see anything, because the radeon GPU physically has no display connectors attached.

[bridgman]

Is that file present in /lib/firmware/radeon ?

Are you building with a stock kernel or custom built, and if the latter is the driver built as a module or built into the kernel image directly ?

[dammarin]

Is that file present in /lib/firmware/radeon ?

Are you building with a stock kernel or custom built, and if the latter is the driver built as a module or built into the kernel image directly ?

I'm simply booting unmodified Ubuntu (16.04 Gnome, since I had that lying around and now 14.04.4 which I'd just downloaded) from USB. Neither boots without nomodeset. The system is not hanging, though. I can do ctrl-alt-del and it will go down nicely.

I don't remember what the error in 16.04 was (have to get back home to check, will do later), if any. The computer I'm currently at runs on 16.04 Ubuntu Gnome and that one has TAHITI_vce.bin in /lib/firmware/radeon.

14.04 gave me the TAHITI_vce.bin error. I just booted the same 14.04.4 USB stick on a different computer and there is no such file in /lib/firmware/radeon (there are some TAHITI files, though: ce, mc, mc2, me, pfp, rlc, smc and uvd).

[bridgman]

Thanks.

So at first glance adding a copy of the TAHITI_vce.bin file should help with your 14.04.4 install. Looks like 14.04.4 might have picked up a newer kernel with VCE support but didn't pick up the corresponding microcode file. You can get the missing file from the linux-firmware repo, which IIRC is updated from agd5f's repo:

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/

https://people.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/radeon_ucode/

Remember that upper- and lower-case files are actually different formats; one contains header info while the other does not. Please don't ask me which is which

[drSeehas]

... that one has TAHITI_vce.bin in /lib/firmware/radeon.

14.04 gave me the TAHITI_vce.bin error. I just booted the same 14.04.4 USB stick on a different computer and there is no such file in /lib/firmware/radeon (there are some TAHITI files, though: ce, mc, mc2, me, pfp, rlc, smc and uvd).

???
in

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/open-source-amd-linux/871675-amd-unleashes-initial-amdgpu-driver-support-for-gcn-1-0-southern-islands-gpus?p=877125#post877125

you have Curaçao/Pitcairn NOT Tahiti.