On Sat, Nov 24, 2018 at 06:06:16PM +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote: > On Sat, 2018-11-24 at 15:21 +0000, Simon McVittie wrote: > [...] > > Recent AMD GPUs use the "amdgpu" kernel driver and its accompanying Mesa > > user-space driver, which is an open source stack if you don't count the > > GPU firmware. It should be comparable to the situation on Intel integrated > > GPUs (but a lot faster and more featureful, and probably with more bugs, > > because the hardware is faster and more featureful). Expect to need a > > recent (buster/sid) kernel, particularly for newer hardware. > > I installed an AMD RX550 based card last year. It required updates to > the kernel, firmware, X driver, and Mesa, which are all available in > stretch-backports.
Oooh, sounds like you have at least some clue here -- _and_ there are non-trivial things one should know. As you can tell from my vitriol, there's no way I'm going to use anything from nVidia -- yet I need to replace most of my main home box quite badly. Thus, are there any particular setups you'd recommend for someone running unstable and Linus' current kernels? Running -rc kernels is especially unfun if your card requires nVidia's proprietary drivers (and so are X transitions in unstable). Nouveau on the other hand has problems on this own, usually crashes -- some reproducible (like enabling xfce's compositor), some random. The card I have right now crashed under load roughly once a week -- until I got a higher resolution monitor. Afterwards, the card can handle static images (editor, browser, ...), but if I try a video or such, it crashes every ~10 minutes bringing the whole kernel down. Speak about "replacement needed urgently"... But, I don't blame this particular card. Its predecessor went down in a fire (thick smoke for the entire room, small but visible actual flame) so it's likely the PCIe slot is suspect, not worth the risk replacing just the GPU without a whole new motherboard (I put in an old but unopened card I happened to have on storage). I think I get the message this machine is telling me... A decade ago, ATI/AMD drivers were abysmal. If I understand you right, they have recently massively improved -- for the values of "recently" of "not yet in Stretch" (which is fine for the likes of us). After a string of 4 nVidia cards that brought me nothing but woe, I wish for something that actually works. And it'd be so nice if instead of having to do the research, this here Ben guy told me "do this" so I can return to hacking on things that have nothing in common with graphics drivers. :) [Not so unrelated to copying in a restaurant. :p] Meow! -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢰⠒⠀⣿⡁ Imagine there are bandits in your house, your kid is bleeding out, ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ the house is on fire, and seven big-ass trumpets are playing in the ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ sky. Your cat demands food. The priority should be obvious...
