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  • Planning to get an AMD GPU - Is my system ready for it?
Planning to get an AMD GPU - Is my system ready for it?
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Avehicle7887 Feb 28, 2020
So as title suggests, I'm planning to move to team red in the GPU space, but before doing so I want to make sure I got everything in place.

So far I have installed:

Kernel 5.5.6
libdrm 2.4.100
All AMD GPU firmware
DRI3 is enabled

Regarding Mesa: Basically my OS comes with Mesa 13 by default (prehistoric) which is only used to boot the desktop, For games and 3D accelerated programs I'm using Mesa 20.0.0 + LLVM 9.0.1 compiled and running through environment variables.

Am I missing something else? For the record, I'm already using this setup with Intel HD but never tried with AMD.

Thanks :)

Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 28 February 2020 at 4:23 pm UTC
tuxintuxedo Feb 28, 2020
"Basically my OS comes with Mesa 13"
I would suggest installing a newer system for a simple reason: updated software and system components. You might swap the kernel and other parts as you see fit on an old OS, but you never know when you break something you wouldn't want.
Aside from that, it should be okay. Although you didn't tell us which card you will get.
Avehicle7887 Feb 28, 2020
Quoting: tuxintuxedo"Basically my OS comes with Mesa 13"
I would suggest installing a newer system for a simple reason: updated software and system components. You might swap the kernel and other parts as you see fit on an old OS, but you never know when you break something you wouldn't want.
Aside from that, it should be okay. Although you didn't tell us which card you will get.

Updating the OS is the last thing I'd like to do, technically it's on a Debian 9 base but heavily modified with many modern packages.

Regarding the GPU (oops) - It's an RX 5500 XT.

Thanks for the input :)
tuxintuxedo Feb 28, 2020
It should work. But according to the Phoronix test in December, it still needs some improvement to catch up to the Windows driver/performance.
awesam Feb 28, 2020
As a basic Linux user (that just wants things to work with the best possible performance) my recommendation is Kernel 5.3.18 and any recent MESA version. The 5.4+ Kernels have been practically unusable for me because of various issues. I always use ACO as default instead of LLVM, very rarely encounter any problems with it.

(I'm on RX 5700 btw, the "rare" ITX one :P)
ziabice Feb 28, 2020
You need latest Mesa and very recent kernel for the RX 5500XT.
Shmerl Mar 3, 2020
For Navi, I recommend kernel 5.6 and Mesa 20 at least.

Last edited by Shmerl on 3 March 2020 at 3:23 am UTC
Avehicle7887 Mar 4, 2020
Thank you so much for your help everyone, I think I got everything ready. Ordered the card today and by the time it arrives, Kernel 5.6 should reach rc6 status.

This is the model I got (it even has a backplate!):

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Just finished cleaning up the host system from the closed source Nvidia driver in preparation for the new card. Decided to have some fun (and a final look) with Nouveau and the good old GTX 960:

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Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 5 March 2020 at 9:35 pm UTC
Avehicle7887 Mar 16, 2020
I am pleased to announce that I've received my card 5 days ago. The preparations I had made to my system were almost on spot, the last and only issue I had was booting the desktop and I've literally spent the past 3 days recompiling the Kernel, building deb packages and skimming through logs to root out the problem.

At one point I was ready to give up, but I went back to the drawing board and reconnected the dots.

This is the end result :) :
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GPU itself and Packaging:
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Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 16 March 2020 at 11:53 pm UTC
Shmerl Mar 17, 2020
Congrats! Were you bitten with having an older kernel or Mesa than was needed to bring up the desktop?

Last edited by Shmerl on 17 March 2020 at 12:11 am UTC
Avehicle7887 Mar 17, 2020
Quoting: ShmerlCongrats! Were you bitten with having an older kernel or Mesa than was needed to bring up the desktop?

The Kernel was in very good shape, I had to enable some non-navi related tweaks to accomodate the system but not related to the desktop issue. The issue was within Mesa, for the moment I didn't create any packages and simply overwritten the libraries over the old ones. It solved the issue but it's not pretty. Later I will build some proper packages to have better file control.

This was a huge learning experience for me. Got no regrets with all the trouble I've had
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