Hi gentoo-user, I'm attempting to configure a mid-range video card: the Radeon R7 370. Running on the Pitcairn chipset and a member of the Southern Islands family, I am surprised at the complexity of setting up the Radeon driver in comparison to its NVIDIA counterpart.
I followed [1] carefully. Initially opting to compile AMDGPU into the kernel, I
emerged linux-firmware with the following files. All of the relevant files were
added to the kernel's CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE string, using /lib/firmware as the
base directory.
radeon/pitcairn_smc.bin
radeon/pitcairn_ce.bin
radeon/pitcairn_mc.bin
radeon/pitcairn_me.bin
radeon/pitcairn_pfp.bin
radeon/pitcairn_k_smc.bin
radeon/pitcairn_rlc.bin
radeon/TAHITI_uvd.bin
radeon/TAHITI_vce.bin
Unfortunately, upon booting, the kernel hangs with the following message. This
seems to be rather common, with a similar complaint being discussed at [2].
fb0: switching to amdgpudrmfb from EFI VGA
As this all occurs pre-OpenRC, I am incapable of creating an S.S.H.\ connection
to the machine from my laptop. When booting the kernel with the `nomodesetting`
parameter, the X server reports the following after a successful kernel boot
(created when executing `startx`): [timestamps omitted]
(EE) Failed to load module "fbdev" (module does not exist, 0)
(II) LoadModule: "vesa"
(WW) Warning, couldn't open module vesa
(EE) Failed to load module "vesa" (module does not exist, 0)
(II) RADEON: Driver for ATI/AMD Radeon chipsets:
ATI Radeon Mobility X600 (M24), ATI FireMV 2400,
ATI Radeon Mobility X300 (M24), ATI FireGL M24 GL,
[...]
ARUBA, TAHITI, PITCAIRN, VERDE, OLAND, HAINAN, BONAIRE, KABINI,
MULLINS, KAVERI, HAWAII
(II) modesetting: Driver for Modesetting Kernel Drivers: kms
(--) using VT number 7
(II) [KMS] drm report modesetting isn't supported.
(EE) open /dev/dri/card0: No such file or directory
(WW) Falling back to old probe method for modesetting
(EE) open /dev/dri/card0: No such file or directory
(EE) Screen 0 deleted because of no matching config section.
(II) UnloadModule: "radeon"
(EE) Screen 0 deleted because of no matching config section.
(II) UnloadModule: "modesetting"
(EE) Device(s) detected, but none match those in the config file.
(EE)
Fatal server error:
(EE) no screens found(EE)
(EE)
In a fruitless attempt to fix this, I opted to instead load AMDGPU as a kernel
module. That did not go far either, as apparently a bug exists in the Radeon
drivers which causes OpenRC to hang when setting the system time according to
the internal clock [3]:
Setting system clock using hardware clock [Local Time]
[hangs forever]
Any help with this would be appreciated. I'm moving away from NVIDIA due to the
requirement of proprietary drivers to get any decent performance, however now it
feels as though the AMD drivers, although open-source, consist of too many bugs
(such as hanging the boot-up process for some reason or another) to be of any
actual use. Whilst I'm aware that is obviously not the case due to the
popularity of their cards, I am bewildered at how difficult this seems.
Cheers.
[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/AMDGPU
[2] https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1061750-start-0.html
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Gentoo/comments/9oax20/
--
Ashley Dixon
suugaku.co.uk
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DA96 D18A
8A7B B0D2
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