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The driver situation for modern AMD GPUs is pretty good. There is an open-source `amdgpu` driver in the mainline Linux kernel maintained by AMD themselves. If y

The driver situation for modern AMD GPUs is pretty good. There is an open-source `amdgpu` driver in the mainline Linux kernel maintained by AMD themselves. If you use a somewhat recent kernel, that'll be there. You need `mesa` in userspace which provides the OpenGL interface, etc. to your applications. This is why there's no need to install anything from the Radeon website -- you already have a driver. As for the `firmware-amd-graphics` package, it provides proprietary firmware for your GPU. That could be as insignificant as microcode updates or an important part of the interface that the driver expects. It's probably a good idea to install (and maybe try and fix the warnings.)

blihp 5y ago
Unless you're running one of the handful of 'officially' supported distros/versions, it really isn't that good yet for at least 6000-series cards. Sure, the upstream video drivers work fine if you just need basic functionality. But if you need more advanced capabilities (i.e. monitoring/managing frequencies/power consumption/etc) or do GPU compute, you're pretty much stuck using the AMD repos which are built for LTS releases of enterprise distros. They can be made to work (with varying degrees of pain) for some releases of desktop distros but it is currently very far from painless.
- slavik81 5y ago
  All the ROCm components beneath HIP are in Debian Unstable (aside from the firmware as per topic), and I think at least a few components made it into Ubuntu 22.04. Facilitating Debian packaging for ROCm has been my hobby for the past year or so. While ROCm doesn't officially support consumer GPUs, the supported W6800 is Navi 21. The consumer Navi 21 cards thus also work. Those are the 6800 / 6800 XT and 6900 XT. If any Debian contributors would like to help package the rest of the ROCm stack, the Debian AI mailing list is where most of the action happens. Disclosure: I work for AMD on ROCm, but all opinions are my own.
  - blihp 5y ago
    A big 'thank you' to you and the others working on this as it is badly needed! I've been following the progress of this work and I'm looking forward to the day when it makes it into testing. Unstable lives up to its name too often for my needs[1]. Unfortunately, my hobby project dance card is full right now or I'd probably try to pitch in. Now a bit of cold water for real world use cases currently... The bulk of the market is on 6700 XT and lower so ROCm is currently effectively saying 'we don't support the vast majority of our shipped cards for compute'[2] which sends a bad message to the consumer/prosumer market. Also, I do hope AMD reconsiders the requirement for PCIe 3.0 atomics support for compute as it seriously limits the utility of its cards in the consumer space.[3] It limits the compute support for most systems to a single slot (i.e. the processor direct PCIe connection) which will result in a 'no-sale' for many people.[4] I recently upgraded to a B550 system and imagine my surprise when I found out the chipset doesn't support it, but the compute drivers require it, so only one AMD card for me... this pushes me back to nVidia, or possibly Intel if they ever ship, for most of my compute needs for foreseeable future. I don't write this to discourage you as it would be great to see AMD be successful on Linux. However, I think it's important for AMD folks to hear real world feedback on the current situation and understand you've got a long ways to go still: I'm on a full AMD system and my experience has been that it (GPU support) is far from ready for prime time so it probably won't be a full AMD system for much longer. [1] Where key packages can disappear for months at a time and serious breakage can and does occur. I understand the need for this in unstable which is why I steer clear of it for my daily driver. [2] Saying 'well just get a 6800 or better' isn't realistic given availability and pricing of the higher end cards to date. I had planned on getting a 6800 [XT] but was not willing to pay the markups due to scalpers/AIB markups. Even the AMD weekly drops didn't help on these cards. So I settled on a 6700 XT until prices return to a more sane level. [3] I tried to raise this issue on the AMD forums but my message got marked as spam. <sigh> [4] Multi-GPU setups for compute are not uncommon on consumer hardware, especially rendering and ML.
    - slavik81 5y ago
      I am just one lowly engineer, but I do what I can. The other 5000 and 6000 series cards work to varying degrees. Unfortunately, since AMD doesn't officially support them, I can't easily get hardware to test them myself. My understanding is that the RX 6700 XT (gfx1031) mostly works, with some caveats. Gentoo did some performance tuning for the BLAS libraries with that GPU. The AMD GPU libraries aren't built for that architecture by default, but I'd be happy to help anyone compile them from source. There's an extensive open source test suite that can be used to validate GPU functionality outside of the official hardware support list.

blihp 5y ago

Unless you're running one of the handful of 'officially' supported distros/versions, it really isn't that good yet for at least 6000-series cards. Sure, the upstream video drivers work fine if you just need basic functionality. But if you need more advanced capabilities (i.e. monitoring/managing frequencies/power consumption/etc) or do GPU compute, you're pretty much stuck using the AMD repos which are built for LTS releases of enterprise distros. They can be made to work (with varying degrees of pain) for some releases of desktop distros but it is currently very far from painless.

slavik81 5y ago
All the ROCm components beneath HIP are in Debian Unstable (aside from the firmware as per topic), and I think at least a few components made it into Ubuntu 22.04. Facilitating Debian packaging for ROCm has been my hobby for the past year or so. While ROCm doesn't officially support consumer GPUs, the supported W6800 is Navi 21. The consumer Navi 21 cards thus also work. Those are the 6800 / 6800 XT and 6900 XT. If any Debian contributors would like to help package the rest of the ROCm stack, the Debian AI mailing list is where most of the action happens. Disclosure: I work for AMD on ROCm, but all opinions are my own.
- blihp 5y ago
  A big 'thank you' to you and the others working on this as it is badly needed! I've been following the progress of this work and I'm looking forward to the day when it makes it into testing. Unstable lives up to its name too often for my needs[1]. Unfortunately, my hobby project dance card is full right now or I'd probably try to pitch in. Now a bit of cold water for real world use cases currently... The bulk of the market is on 6700 XT and lower so ROCm is currently effectively saying 'we don't support the vast majority of our shipped cards for compute'[2] which sends a bad message to the consumer/prosumer market. Also, I do hope AMD reconsiders the requirement for PCIe 3.0 atomics support for compute as it seriously limits the utility of its cards in the consumer space.[3] It limits the compute support for most systems to a single slot (i.e. the processor direct PCIe connection) which will result in a 'no-sale' for many people.[4] I recently upgraded to a B550 system and imagine my surprise when I found out the chipset doesn't support it, but the compute drivers require it, so only one AMD card for me... this pushes me back to nVidia, or possibly Intel if they ever ship, for most of my compute needs for foreseeable future. I don't write this to discourage you as it would be great to see AMD be successful on Linux. However, I think it's important for AMD folks to hear real world feedback on the current situation and understand you've got a long ways to go still: I'm on a full AMD system and my experience has been that it (GPU support) is far from ready for prime time so it probably won't be a full AMD system for much longer. [1] Where key packages can disappear for months at a time and serious breakage can and does occur. I understand the need for this in unstable which is why I steer clear of it for my daily driver. [2] Saying 'well just get a 6800 or better' isn't realistic given availability and pricing of the higher end cards to date. I had planned on getting a 6800 [XT] but was not willing to pay the markups due to scalpers/AIB markups. Even the AMD weekly drops didn't help on these cards. So I settled on a 6700 XT until prices return to a more sane level. [3] I tried to raise this issue on the AMD forums but my message got marked as spam. <sigh> [4] Multi-GPU setups for compute are not uncommon on consumer hardware, especially rendering and ML.
  - slavik81 5y ago
    I am just one lowly engineer, but I do what I can. The other 5000 and 6000 series cards work to varying degrees. Unfortunately, since AMD doesn't officially support them, I can't easily get hardware to test them myself. My understanding is that the RX 6700 XT (gfx1031) mostly works, with some caveats. Gentoo did some performance tuning for the BLAS libraries with that GPU. The AMD GPU libraries aren't built for that architecture by default, but I'd be happy to help anyone compile them from source. There's an extensive open source test suite that can be used to validate GPU functionality outside of the official hardware support list.