Help...First time installing a Radeon on Linux (7800 XT)
Hi guys! Brand new PC…And I’m trying to install its brand new 7800XT. I’ve chosen KDE Neon, as it was my previous OS, and I’ve grown to like it. I’d like to stick with it if possible…I’m writing this preamble, because when I try to run amdgpu-install from the AMD downloads page, all I get is:
Unsupported OS: /etc/os-release ID ‘neon’
So…what can I do? Neon is mostly Ubuntu 22.04 to most effects. Kernel is 6.2.0-36-generic.
You might try to add the repository for it without using the script. I followed this page, but you can skip the rocm parts of it (except for adding the key). I managed to install it on Debian 12 this way.
As most people suggested, I guess I don’t need the proprietary drivers at all. I managed to get it working with kisa’s ppa and an updated AMD firmware file for the kernel (and a quick initramfs rebuild). However I’m experiencing a weird glitch on multi-monitor setup now…
I hope you already solved your problem. I have a 7800xt like you and bought it a week after it launched, I had a distro based on Ubuntu with xanmod kernel and Mesa from oibaf PPA So after I plugged in the GPU, I had to download the latest firmware.git and extract it on the right path, after this I just rebooted and everything was working good.
Just for future reference: if you’re on any major Linux distribution, use the drivers they provide in their repositories. For a consumer AMD card, you don’t have to install anything. Nvidia have their proprietary drivers, but still avoid the ones from the website
I’m not saying this doesn’t happen. I’m saying that if the driver is the actual problem, the solution is different from what you’d expect on a different OS
For AMD you really should just stick to the drivers that will already be included out of the box, and generally you’ll get a better experience using newer kernels, especially for a relatively recent architecture like RDNA3.
Oof. I had the same issue when I (back when it was new) used a 6800XT on a Mint install with an old kernel. Maybe it’s worth testing with a newer kernel or on a distro that pushes more frequent kernel/Mesa updates
Yeah thanks! I got it working in the end with the updated recent AMD firmware from the kernel release, updating to an 6.5-oem kernel, and rebuilding initramfs with the updated firmware files, as detailed here: askubuntu.com/…/how-to-make-ubuntu-22-04-work-wit…
AMD has the AMDGPU kernel driver already in place in the linux kernel, and excluding the newest generations of cards for about a month or two after they come out, that part should work fine. Additionally, you need Mesa installed for the userspace drivers. It is typically preinstalled and covers the OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for your card.
Pretty much the only time you want to run the driver from AMD’s site is if you’re using some particular professional applications, otherwise Mesa tends to outperform it. There are relatively few games that AMDVLK (the AMD official open source Vulkan driver) is ahead, and it’s got an edge in most (all?) raytracing cases currently.
Lastly, the reason it doesn’t work is because the driver install script is checking your os-release version to see if it matches the Ubuntu version it was packaged for. If you’re confident that you can fix any problems that arise from doing this, you could presumably just change the string in /etc/os-release to match what it’s looking for. I don’t recommend doing this, though, unless you don’t care if the drivers break things because they weren’t packaged for the release you’re using.
Thanks. I wasn’t aware of the difference privative vs public ones on AMD. On Nvidia (where I came from) it’s kinda the opposite, noveau kinda works, but if you really want to play with proper performance, you should head for the privative one. In the end it was just easier to download the AMD firmware from the latest linux release, and recompile with that. It worked after that.
If you were missing firmware, that’s not actually a driver issue. You do need the firmware and (unless you also installed the professional drivers as well) you should be all good now and using the full open source stack.
Yeah…kinda. Now on multi-monitor setup I have a weird glitch…when one of the monitors are turned off. Screen will start flickering rearranging the windows. Weird.
Do you mean it constantly does it when a monitor is turned off or that when you initially turn off a monitor, it rearranges all windows to fit on the remaining monitor.
If the first, I’m not sure what the problem might be, but the second is pretty normal, I think. The card sees that the display was detached and moves your windows to the attached display so you can see them.
AMD has the AMDGPU kernel driver already in place in the linux kernel, and excluding the newest generations of cards for about a month or two after they come out, that part should work fine.
Reading his comment, it looks like KDE Neon ships with a two-year-old kernel, so I assume that that’s the issue.
So…what can I do? Neon is mostly Ubuntu 22.04 to most effects. Kernel is 6.2.0-36-generic.
The kernel in use should support RDNA3, I believe.
Edit: judging from the comment made a bit ago, it wasn’t the kernel or mesa, they were just missing the firmware. And yeah, that’ll do it. I remember being frustrated with my 7900xtx not working on Pop! before I pulled in the firmware back on release.
I changed the file download to the latest, which at this moment is linux-firmware-20231111.tar.gz. After the update-initramfs, reboot (since I already ran the PPA earlier…to no avail), and this time it worked, and it immediately showed me the second monitor, which had been dead for the last couple of hours since I started fighting this thing.
A second update after this is, since I’m using Wayland and multi-monitor (two HDMI connections, one the main monitor, the second to a big LCD TV)…when the TV is turned off, the monitor starts to flicker rearranging the windows (!?). I describe the issue a bit more in detail here… lemm.ee/post/14853567
You can go download their stuff if you want the absolute latest or something, but unless I had some kind of problem with the driver my distro shipped, I probably wouldn’t bother.
I also have a 7800 XT and use Debian. I had to download firmware from git.kernel.org, as not even the package in unstable is new enough: stable has 2023-02-10, unstable currently has 2023-05-15, while 7800 XT (and 7700 XT) needs 2023-08-04 or newerAt least bookworm-backports has a new enough kernel now. (6.5, IIRC 6.4 is the minimum.)
But to get ROCm working, I ended up adding AMD repositories and using its drivers with the 6.1 kernel from stable.
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