Updated and Optimized Ubuntu Free Graphics Drivers

[oibaf]

Note: Phoronix disabled editing forum posts some time ago, so check the main PPA page for updated informations!

0 - Introduction

Some year ago I wrote a guide on Installing latest Open Source ATI drivers under Ubuntu to provide the new - at the time - Radeon R500 support with free drivers.

Now Ubuntu 11.04 (natty) just get released shipping latest official mesa release 7.10.2. However current mesa snapshots have a huge amount of new features which make feel old this official release. Ubuntu 10.10 (maverick) ships an older pre-release snapshot of mesa 7.9.

So I am now providing a PPA with updated mesa and X drivers as an easy way for users to try all the new features developed in the past months and early detect eventual bugs to report to developers. This is somewhat inspired by the xorg-edgers PPA but it only provides graphics drivers to lower the risk of breakage. Also I want to provide some packaging improvements and possibly new features (e.g. integrate testing branches like glsl-130 or pipe-video) when they'll be sufficient stable.

Supported Ubuntu versions: 10.10 (maverick) and 11.04 (natty).

1 - Improvements

Mesa improvements:

• 7.11 snapshot from git master
• lots of new OpenGL extensions and almost complete OpenGL3 support
• improved games support (e.g. Humble Frozenbyte Bundle games and Unigine 3D engine)
• performance improvements, especially on the gallium drivers (e.g. over 2x in TORCS on r300g)
• bug fixes

Note that being snapshots they may also have new bugs.

Mesa packaging improvements:

• support for S3TC texture compression* (Recommends included libtxc-dxtn)
• support for floating-point textures*
• llvm support (for faster gallium drivers)
• gallium llvmpipe as the default software renderer rather than classic swrast
• i915 and nouveau gallium drivers in the experimental package
• --enable-debug flag (to better debug mesa and games bugs)
• better package compression with 50% binary size reduction (for faster download)
• custom OpenGL version string to make sure you are running drivers from this PPA

*these are patented features that can be used after agreeing the related IP: ARB_texture_float and EXT_texture_compression_s3tc. They are provided here for testing purpose only, anyway.

For more details check the changelog.

Updated drivers and libdrm from git:

• xserver-xorg-video-ati
• xserver-xorg-video-intel
• xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
• libdrm

Only free drivers will be provided. No binary fglrx and nvidia drivers.

2 - Installing
Just type this in a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Alternatively, add:

ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers

to your system's Software Sources and update the package from here.

If all goes well, and if glxinfo is installed, typing in a shell:

glxinfo | grep OpenGL

will print the driver type and version with the PPA custom string.

3 - Using alternative drivers
Examples on how to run your OpenGL program (in this case glxgears -info) with non default drivers.

To force the use of gallium llvmpipe software render:

LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 glxgears -info

To force the use of old non-gallium software render:

LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH=/usr/lib/dri-alternates glxgears -info

To force the use of old non-gallium r300/r600 radeon drivers:

LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH=/usr/lib/dri-alternates glxgears -info

Experimental drivers:
If you want to use the gallium nouveau or i915 driver install also the experimental package:

sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental

The gallium nouveau driver will then be used by default rather than using llvmpipe.

To force the use of gallium i915 driver (classic driver will still be the default):

LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH=/usr/lib/dri-alternates glxgears -info

4 - Debugging and reporting problems

If you have some problem with the drivers try running the application from the command line and see if there are any graphics related warnings (note that mesa is built with --enable-debug which can provide useful debug informations). Also type dmesg to see if there are other related informations here. If you get crashes install the relevant -dbg pacakges (libgl1-mesa-dri-dbg or libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental-dbg for 3D drivers and xserver-xorg-video-intel-dbg , xserver-xorg-video-nouveau-dbg or xserver-xorg-video-radeon-dbg for X drivers) and reproduce the crash with gdb. Example:

$ gdb glxgears
[...make your application crash and then get a backtrace with:]
(gdb) bt

If X.org crashes look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log (or /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old when a new X session is started after the crash).

With the gathered informations try querying freedesktop bugzilla for similar bugs (also try with google). If no bugs were already reported, you may want to report a new one:

• 3D drivers bug
• X / 2D driver bug

5 - Revert to original drivers
To revert to standard Ubuntu drivers (strongly suggested before an Ubuntu release upgrade) type the following in a prompt shell:

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers

6 - Requests and suggestions
Feel free to request new features or propose any suggestions here!

[debianxfce]

Problem is, I dumped Ubuntu & installed Debian, latest firmware-amd package looks to be 15 days outdated in debian. Now it just shows black screen with mouse pointer.

Sure, if you installed Debian "stable". Upgrade to buster and then to Sid. For a clean install, you can use my distribution.

[MaXaMaR]

Problem is, I dumped Ubuntu & installed Debian, latest firmware-amd package looks to be 15 days outdated in debian. Now it just shows black screen with mouse pointer.

[debianxfce]

Hi hope somebody can help me with my issue.

[ 5.432083] amdgpu 0000:13:00.0: Direct firmware load for amdgpu/polaris10_k_mc.bin failed with error -2[/CODE]
l

You need to install the latest firmware-amd-graphics package. https://packages.debian.org/sid/firmware-amd-graphics

[MaXaMaR]

So the fix was to upgrade to disco, great.

[MaXaMaR]

Hi hope somebody can help me with my issue.
Ubuntu 18.10 (non-lts, normal) on top of ESXi box, RX590, gives messages

[    5.154978] amdgpu 0000:13:00.0: BAR 6: can't assign [??? 0x00000000 flags 0x20000000] (bogus alignment)
[    5.432083] amdgpu 0000:13:00.0: Direct firmware load for amdgpu/polaris10_k_mc.bin failed with error -2

lspci shows:

13:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Ellesmere [Radeon RX 470/480/570/570X/580/580X] (rev e1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
    Subsystem: Sapphire Technology Limited Nitro+ Radeon RX 580 4GB

Added this repository and nothing changed. Can't install AMDGPU-PRO as only 18.04 is supported.
Windows 10 is doing ok, recognizing as RX590.
Maybe I need to update amdgpu, haven't found how.

[ernstp]

The issue on disco is fixed now (with no PPA code change...).

Great :-D

[oibaf]

The issue on disco is fixed now (with no PPA code change...).

[oibaf]

Inside the xz there is a debian directory. I use the same source for disco, cosmic and bionic, just change the version number inside debian/changelog. (xenial required a different debian dir, but I no longer support it)
It fails to build just on disco, but it builds fine on bionic and cosmic.

[ernstp]

I don't have a public repo, the source is in the PPA.
Open https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archiv...vers/+packages and click on the package, the source is under that.
For example the latest mesa disco (failed build) is this: https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archiv...oibaf~d.tar.xz

Thanks for your interest.

I imagined a repo with you script to manage stuff and deltas and stuff. But right, a debdiff or something... Does it have to work for all b-c-d at the same time or just disco?