Ubuntu 19.10 Doesn't Ship With AMD Navi / Radeon RX 5700 Support Working, But Easy To Enable

[starshipeleven]

double-fixed

At least Ubuntu has an "Additional Drivers" app to assist on that.

That app?

Oh you mean the app that is completely useless if you are stuck with terminal when your main GUI can't start because you don't have drivers or firmware to initialize the GPU 3D and 2D acceleration engines?

Yeah, Ubuntu has that app.

But I was hinting at something else.
Decent distros provide a "fallback" GUI to be used with VESA, that runs like garbage but it only needs a CPU and a framebuffer to show a GUI, this is of course a massive help if you installed a DE that needs OpenGL 2.0 or better to work at all.

OpenSUSE for example always installs IceWM and its "DE" components, creating a tiny low-resource DE that does not need OpenGL, and you can choose that when logging in instead of KDE/GNOME. It will look dated but it will allow you to limp around with a GUI to go and fix issues after install without having to use console commands. It's kind of a Windows-like "Safe Mode".

Also Mageia, another distro that shares many design principles with OpenSUSE does the same (it also includes IceWM as a fallback GUI).

[tildearrow]

That app?

Oh you mean the app that is completely useless if you are stuck with terminal when your main GUI can't start because you don't have drivers or firmware to initialize the GPU 3D and 2D acceleration engines?

Yeah, Ubuntu has that app.

But I was hinting at something else.
Decent distros provide a "fallback" GUI to be used with VESA, that runs like garbage but it only needs a CPU and a framebuffer to show a GUI, this is of course a massive help if you installed a DE that needs OpenGL 2.0 or better to work at all.

OpenSUSE for example always installs IceWM and its "DE" components, creating a tiny low-resource DE that does not need OpenGL, and you can choose that when logging in instead of KDE/GNOME. It will look dated but it will allow you to limp around with a GUI to go and fix issues after install without having to use console commands. It's kind of a Windows-like "Safe Mode".

Also Mageia, another distro that shares many design principles with OpenSUSE does the same (it also includes IceWM as a fallback GUI).

Oh yeah! I remember the pain that the "driver failure" dialog would cause. Sometimes it'd even occur just right after installation.

I wish Ubuntu also had a solution like openSUSE...

[tjaalton]

That app?

Oh you mean the app that is completely useless if you are stuck with terminal when your main GUI can't start because you don't have drivers or firmware to initialize the GPU 3D and 2D acceleration engines?

The main GUI runs just fine with a plain framebuffer, which is what happens when you have no KMS driver for the GPU. And when the driver is buggy or can't handle missing firmware or whatnot, you can boot with safe gfx mode which forces nomodeset.

[digitalsin]

The RX 5700 series work out of the box on Fedora 31. Just sayin.

It didn't for me last time I tried their beta....

[Venemo]

It didn't for me last time I tried their beta....

I've been using it for a while and it works for me well.

[mikelpr]

I've been using it for a while and it works for me well.

I just got a 5700 XT today and it's very laggy in 4K, while my RX590 was constant 60fps

[Venemo]

I just got a 5700 XT today and it's very laggy in 4K, while my RX590 was constant 60fps

I've got two 4K monitors connected to my 5700XT, and don't see any lag. Sounds like maybe you are missing something on your system and it falls back to software rendering. Are you sure you actually have hardware acceleration enabled on your system?

[mikelpr]

I've got two 4K monitors connected to my 5700XT, and don't see any lag. Sounds like maybe you are missing something on your system and it falls back to software rendering. Are you sure you actually have hardware acceleration enabled on your system?

yeah I'm sure otherwise it'd be tearing and dropping many more frames.

anyways the wayland session has no stuttering - I'd still like to fix the xorg session as chrome and electron apps have no high resolution scrolling on wayland

[Darxus]

It took me a year to realize I should post here that I created a PPA that does this for you, on ubuntu: https://launchpad.net/~darxus/+archi...e-amdgpu-daily

If you're not familiar with PPAs, this is a version of the package that automatically downloads the latest version of the amdgpu stuff from linux-firmware mainline, and rebuilds the package. Then it gets upgraded with your usual package upgrade process. I've been using it since I created it, a bunch of others seem to use it, and I haven't heard of any problems.