Updated and Optimized Ubuntu Free Graphics Drivers

[oibaf]

rusticl now requires Ubuntu noble/24.04.

[CLwish93]

rusticl now requires Ubuntu noble/24.04.

Well this is a problem for me. Is there anything I can do to get a functional OpenCL instance in Ubuntu 22.04? I have switchted to this ppa from kisak because it's rusticl instance was crashing a lot. For now I have downgraded just the mesa-opencl-icd package to kisak while retaining everything else oibaf. I also can't use Clover, because the gfx*-amdgcn-mesa-mesa3d.bc file is missing, which I believe can only be obtained with the libclc-amdgcn package, but then that breaks other parts of mesa. Why is AMD so utterly broken on Linux? Made an account just to ask this. Thanks

[lorn10]

CLwish93

The situation regarding OpenCL on Linux will became better with rusticl. But at the moment it is simply not ready because rusticl is under heavy development. This will get better during the next months I hope.

And there is a reason why 22.04 LTS is still on LLVM 15.0.7. I think this is distro related and even the corresponding Debian variant has some strange flaws with newer LLVM versions. So this seems to be a deeper rooted problem in Debian/Ubuntu which won't be resolved. The solution is most likely to simply update to a newer release like 24.04 LTS when it is final.

Regarding clover, the compatibility was (unintentionally) improved in LLVM 16 but is again badly hit with LLVM 17. See Mesa MR 24879 for more details.

[oibaf]

Some features get disabled on older distro because they would require dependencies not available there, especially everything rust related.

[lorn10]

Thanks oibaf for the explanation. So in the end a too old "rust" support on 22.04 is the reason why we don't have it anymore.

And newer LLVM on jammy is hindered because of some strange SPIRV LLVM translator problems in Debian/Ubuntu.

Whatever, it should be added that the clover problem of CLwish93 is because RDNA class hardware support is missing in libclc. But it looks that there exist some sort of patches to get it somehow working. See LLVM bug #52665 for more details. And there exist also one at Mesa, check Mesa bug #4189.

Edit: Here can be found a patch for gfx9 and gfx10 made by zboszor. But for whatever reason it never got merged.

[lorn10]

CLwish93

There exist finally a LLVM merge request which adds support of newer Radeon hardware to libclc. This should ultimately and properly resolve those "the gfx*-amdgcn-mesa-mesa3d.bc file is missing" errors. See LLVM MR #78884 for more details.

Note, - there exists some drawbacks with newer LLVM versions and clover. So check my comment here if you want to try this out.

[CLwish93]

@lorn10,

Thank you for helping/inspiring someone to make the merge request.

Although I am very confused right now with mesa and drivers in general on my machine. I am not knowledgeable in this field, I mainly wanted DaVinci Resolve, hashcat, and a few other programs to work on my PC.

I thought that oibaf's ppa was causing problems on my system, so I went through the arduous process of removing the ppa then downgrading every package manually. Now, I think everything is ok, but I can't run clinfo anymore to tell you what gfx model number my card is - it's a Navi14, if that helps. clinfo just hangs now.

The strange part is that everything still seems to "work" - at least the way it did before. Rusticl can go through a bit of hashcat's benchmarking process before crashing. But even more curious, is that the AMD APP platform made it through the entire thing, and I swear I didn't notice that before. Also my amdgpu-install script tells me dkms failed for my running kernel, which I don't think was a problem before I manually downgraded all those packages.

I don't know if I even needed to remove oibaf's ppa, but I do know that it's not recommended to mix it with other graphics ppas like Kisak's.

So in the end a too old "rust" support on 22.04 is the reason why we don't have it anymore.

Can this be "fixed" by using rustup to upgrade to Nightly?

Thank you lorn10 and oibaf for the replies, and sorry for my lack of understanding on this topic

[lorn10]

By the way, the mentioned LLVM/libclc MR "libclc: add missing AMD gfx symlinks" is now merged. That happened faster than expected. And it brings even support for the latest RDNA generation!

Perhaps oibaf is able to add that patch to our LLVM15 Jammy branch? That would enable some sort of clover support also on GCN5 and RDNA class hardware on 22.04 LTS. Well, - I have currently no idea how that clover support will look.

But it would be in any case nice to have. This would open the door to experiment with it.

CLwish93 You have now a quite mixed OpenCL environment with various components from different OpenCL APIs. But when it is working then it is working. However, in the case that the mentioned libclc patch can be used also in LLVM 15 then I would revert in your case everything to stock. So purging the AMD APP, the Kisak and Oibaf PPA and then re-installing the later again (after a reboot) from scratch. It would be really interesting to know how clover on GCN5 and RDNA will perform, - if it even works.

I think that there exist quite some possibility that RDNA class hardware would need the updated AMD LLVM stuff of Mesa MR !7357 and perhaps also Mesa MR !7231 and Mesa MR !15876.

[oibaf]

I added to the PPA updated package for the game lincity-ng 2.9.0 (backport of the package in Debian/Ubuntu noble). Enjoy! ️

[oscar]

NVK is out of experimental! (-Dvulkan-drivers=nouveau) and CTS validated.. can you build at least on noble?
thanks!