The Latest Efforts On Getting The Radeon RX 590 To Work With Linux

When the Radeon RX 590 launched two weeks ago, Linux support wasn't anticipated to be a problem with it being yet another Polaris graphics card and largely unchanged from a driver perspective compared to the RX 580 and other Polaris cards the past few years. Sadly at least for some AIB RX 590 cards, that hasn't turned out to be the case.

After buying a Sapphire Radeon RX 590 on launch-day for testing, it wasn't working at all with the AMDGPU Linux driver. When booting modern kernel releases, the fan speed would ramp up and we would lose the display output.

In the days after that, a new patch and new microcode files came about, but still was no avail for getting the graphics card lighting up under Linux with acceleration.

Since that previous update, the efforts have not stopped. I've tried with the AMDGPU-PRO / Radeon Software 18.40 driver to no avail as well as trying out some other AMDGPU DRM kernel driver patches, none of which panned out.

Fortunately, a few days back the AMD Linux driver team ended up acquiring the Radeon RX 590 that was the same model I've been using. It has turned out to be a video BIOS issue or something with that vBIOS that the Linux driver doesn't know how to deal with, leading to the show-stopping behavior.

They're still investigating but at least progress is being made and they can indeed reproduce the issue. So hopefully it will only be a few more days before some patches become available for testing to get the RX 590 lit up on Linux and then the fun with benchmarking this $280 USD graphics card.