What You Need To Do To Your Linux System If You Want Open-Source RX 480 Support

[bridgman]

I'm confused with AMD's driver strategy. I see in this slide pack http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTgwODA that there are three options, all open, non-pro, and pro. Is there no longer a non-pro version? I thought that the pro version was for FireGL cards. Is there still going to be a Catalyst/Crimson (I don't even know what they're calling it anymore) for Linux, or must we go exclusively with the open source driver?

We dropped the non-pro version (or maybe merged it with Pro version is more correct) in favour of pushing a bit harder on the all-open stack for GL features & performance. Right now the hybrid driver is useful for gaming, partly because a lot of games out there were written and tuned against the closed source GL driver from fglrx and partly because it lets us deliver a Vulkan driver quickly.

[bridgman]

Thanks! Any word on the minimum kernel version I'll need? At work (where I'm most likely to use a RX 480), we use Suse Linux Enterprise, so we run a bit behind on the kernel.

For all-open you're going to want 4.7 for sure, hopefully nothing required on top of that. For hybrid/pro most of the testing has been on 4.4 kernel AFAIK. Most of the kernel dependencies are really on the drm subsystem rather than other kernel code... don't remember if SLE* pulls in newer drm bits or not.

[Kano]

@BillBroadley

Since when competes the RX 480 with a GTX 1070? Should be around GTX 980 (Windows). You can forget the CF/DX12 scaling for Linux completely.

[bridgman]

You can forget the CF/DX12 scaling for Linux completely...

Yep... think about Vulkan scaling instead (with multi-GPU-aware apps, same as DX12).

[Taupi]

Michael Larabel
can you publish the list of tests you will offer us tomorrow about the RX480 please? It respects the nda ^^
Do you plan to include in the phoronix test UnrealTournament 2016?

[juno]

I'm confused with AMD's driver strategy. I see in this slide pack http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTgwODA that there are three options, all open, non-pro, and pro. Is there no longer a non-pro version?

Well, bridgman already answered this, but in case you're interested, those slides are outdated and here are the more recent slides from XDC 2015: https://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC201...hou_amdgpu.pdf

[ecloud]

So far I'm not having much luck on Arch Linux. The amdgpu-pro stuff has AUR pkgbuilds. With the current 4.6.3 kernel plus that, startx kept giving me an error like removed screen 1 because there was no matching config. I tried writing an xorg.conf - still wasn't happy. But at least the framebuffer works OK.

So I thought fine, I'll try that polaris branch from git; but then I'm not sure which framebuffer config will work best after you have enabled the amdgpu driver: simple framebuffer, vesa, or radeon. With vesa and simple both enabled, it partially boots, then says switching to amdgpu framebuffer, and hangs. If vesa is not there, but one or the other of simple or radeon is enabled, it still hangs.

So Michael, could we have your working config, or some hints about it? Maybe also confirm the sha1 from git that you are using?

[bridgman]

If you are going to use amdgpu-pro then you want a kernel version reasonably close to what Ubuntu 16.04 uses (4.4-based) or the DKMS package may run into build errors. Latest microcode comes in one of the amdgpu pro packages.

If you are using the all-open stack then you want the latest possible kernel; either the polaris-test or drm-fixes-4.7 branch from agd5f's repo, or the just-released rc6 kernel. You'll also need the latest microcode and latest mesa.

[M@yeulC]

Yeah, passive should work unless you need a Dual-link DVI, which requires an active adapter. I think some people confuse DVI-D with Dual-link DVI. DVI-D just means the interface only supports digital output, while DVI-I supports analog as well as digital (and can be adapted to VGA).

Correct. I keep confusing these two :/