AMDGPU and Radeon Driver Packages from XServer on Same Machine?

[IAmDarthMole]

So in my continued quest to try and figure out my graphics issue with one adsflkja application I have come across something that makes little sense to me (surprise surprise right?):

I have found that there are two opensource packages for AMD graphics cards: AMDGPU for newer cards, and then Radeon for older. I'm running a Sapphire HD 7950 (have two, they were in crossfire but I separated them) on this rig.

From what I read here (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/AMDGPU) and here (https://wiki.freedesktop.org/xorg/Radeo ... /#index6h2) the 7900 line is part of the Tahiti chipset of the Southern Island family. Both packages seemingly cover the Tahiti chipset. I also found that both packages are installed on my machine. From what I think I know about Windows, drivers are finicky and don't like to play well by themselves let alone with each other.

Is it normal to have both? Could that be my problem if it is isn't normal? Do I simply uninstall one and see what happens and if that doesn't work do the other or is two driver packages, again, normal?

Thank you in advance for your time and patience!

[thx-1138]

...Xorg enumerates on startup the currently installed video and/or input drivers,
and picks up the ones that it deems suitable to use for your detected hardware.
You''ll find you have various drivers pre-installed thereby, eg. for older ati cards, nouveau for Nvidia etc etc.
Conflicts among such are relatively rare...and usually, nowadays, when such 'confusion' happens,
it's either on too old hardware (something got broke...), or on very new hardware (support isn't there yet exactly...),
eg. say like loading both fbdev & intel at the same time...
To keep it short, nope, it's not like Windows...for the most part, xorg drivers happily co-exist installed in the system.
Removing the absolutely unused ones will merely slightly speed up it's operations on start up...
cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | less if curious.
Generally speaking though, until you gain a certain familiarity with it, it's not a good idea messing around especially with Xorg:
minor wrong changes to it's files, and it will happily drop you afterwards to a tty where you'll have to fix / edit configs via command line.

In regards to enabling amdgpu instead of radeon for Tahiti...read here for more.
xed admin:///etc/default/grub
Modify / add there as follows:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="radeon.si_support=0 amdgpu.si_support=1 quiet splash"

Save, run sudo update-grub, reboot. amdgpu should then be in use.

You can check which driver is currently in use (compare before with afterwards) with either inxi -G,
or even better, with lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 Dis
Example from here...with a cheap Hainan card, radeon untouched, & amdgpu manually enabled as per above...

03:00.0 Display controller [0380]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Sun XT [Radeon HD 8670A/8670M/8690M / R5 M330 / M430 / Radeon 520 Mobile] [1002:6660] (rev 83)
Subsystem: Lenovo Radeon R5 M330 [17aa:3809]
Kernel driver in use: amdgpu
Kernel modules: radeon, amdgpu

In regards to it's semi-experimental status...from personal experience, i do have spotted it on occasion during 2018,
behaving sometimes better on certain CGN 1.x cards than in some...newer GCN 2.x ones (so go figure).
On my very low-end Hainan here however...not only it behaves way better than radeon,
but also solved me some long-standing issues / bugs. All in all, if unlucky, your mileage may vary indeed:
on the whole though i've certainly seen it solving problems way more frequently than causing such.
As for performance itself, you can install/use glmark2 to compare before & afterwards.
Personally i didn't see any special / noticeable difference if you ask me, more or less the same on average.
I'd generally be somewhat surprised / suspicious if people with older GCN cards told me the difference they saw,
was somehow 'drastic' and not minor / more or less the same...

Good luck.

[Appoloin]

I've been thinking about trying AMDGPU, my laptop came with a Sea Island (Kaver) card. Would it be possible add an option in the grub menu, for example option 1 uses the radeonSI driver and option 2 uses the AMDGPU driver.

One more thing what is the best mesa version to use with AMDGPU, the LTS version is a bit old.

[Hoser Rob]

I've been thinking about trying AMDGPU, my laptop came with a Sea Island (Kaver) card. Would it be possible add an option in the grub menu, for example option 1 uses the radeonSI driver and option 2 uses the AMDGPU driver.

One more thing what is the best mesa version to use with AMDGPU, the LTS version is a bit old.

Your card is on the list of radeon supported cards ...

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

... and it isn't on the amdgpu list ...

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AMDGPU-Driver

... so no, installing amdgpu isn't a good idea. Installing a newer mesa would be an even worse idea and pretty likely to break your graphics. This isn't WIndows, in Linux you do not want to get the latest driver unless you have a very, very new card.

[thx-1138]

....................................

...for Kaveri, you could use radeon.cik_support=0 amdgpu.cik_support=1.
For Mesa, i'd generally recommend staying with the LTS default version.

[IAmDarthMole]

To keep it short, nope, it's not like Windows...for the most part, xorg drivers happily co-exist installed in the system.
Removing the absolutely unused ones will merely slightly speed up it's operations on start up...

Thank you so much for the reply!

In regards to enabling amdgpu instead of radeon for Tahiti...read here for more.

Thank you so much for the link and instructions!

I'll be in touch tonight or tomorrow once I have a moment to sit down and hopefully not break things by switching the drivers. Again thank you so much for your reply and help with my situation!

[Appoloin]

Is it possible to have the option in the grub menu as to which driver is used, so default mint would boot to use Radeon but if I'm gaming mint would be booted using AMDGPU.

I'm assuming hot swapping is not possible.

The Vulkan and Gallium9 updates can wait until mint 19.2 which will more than likely have a stack refresh.

[IAmDarthMole]

Alrighty, I was able to do the steps, sadly though it didn't solve my issue.

Forcing the AMDGPU drivers seemingly made the machine flow a little better compared to what I saw before in regard to background images during log-in and it made me redo the monitor configuration, however, in regard to the situation I'm having with a particular application, it made the situation worse. I also got an error on the other version of said app that said there wasn't any encoding with my chosen drivers after I switched to the AMDGPU. I switched back reversing the 0 and 1 and that still didn't fix it so for the time being I just took the line out. Below is a copy of my terminal after opening the "grub file" (?), making the change, saving it and closing it, and then using the update grub command. It threw errors but when I ran inxi it showed the change in drivers so I'm not sure.

If you don't see anything wrong in the code copy and paste I'll go head and close the post as solved. If there is something that jumps out please let me know. Thanks!

Code: Select all

jason@Hyperion-Respawned:~$ xed admin:///etc/default/grub

** (xed:4016): WARNING **: 16:18:04.400: The specified location is not mounted

(xed:4016): Gdk-CRITICAL **: 16:18:04.403: gdk_window_get_window_type: assertion 'GDK_IS_WINDOW (window)' failed
jason@Hyperion-Respawned:~$ sudo update-grub
[sudo] password for jason:             
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub'
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub.d/50_linuxmint.cfg'
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.18.0-15-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-4.18.0-15-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.15.0-45-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-45-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.15.0-20-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-20-generic
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.elf
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
error: invalid volume.
grub-probe: error: cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/sdb1.  Check your device.map.
done