Switching to graphics chipset with AMDGPU?

[khelben1979]

I would like to know if there's a control center for the AMDGPU driver provided by the xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu package? I have a AMD Carrizo graphics chipset over here on an HP laptop and because of the heat and noise I always have the setting in my AMD Control Center to use the graphics chipset and the graphic card totally disabled. I'm still waiting to upgrade my OS (Debian Jessie) over here, but I don't want to mess it up so I patienly wait to next year, just to make sure I get as little bugs as possible even though the Debian 9 has been in the state of "stable" for some time now. So this is an important issue for me, to know if this setting exist or not. Thanks for your help!

[bw123]

That's an interesting issue. I have used older radeon boards for a long time on linux, and always used the free radeon driver. The boards all require the non-free firmware. I think the pkg name is firmware-amd-graphics now, but it used to be firmware-radeon IIRC.

Your post isn't real clear about what driver you are using that has the control center? That was a windows thing back in the day, CCC was the Catalyst Control Center. It was also kind of Cranky, Crappy, and Complicated. I never used that on linux, where did you get it? if you have to disable features on the board to control heat and noise, then why would you want to keep that?

I never really had too many issues with heat or noise using the default radeon drivers, but I have used utilities to hack the fan controls on radeon boards occasionally. Sometimes the fan runs at a low speed and then suddenly goes full blast on some cards, there are utilities to smooth out the ramp. The driver really has nothing to do with that, it's the video bios you can edit the fan percentages based on temp.

I saw one of your older posts where Bulkley suggested trying a live stretch installation, so what happened? Did you get the same heat and noise issues? Did you try live with persistence so you could use the firmware?

Heat and noise when using a radeon display device isn't uncommon, but I guess you should get to the bottom of it, instead of workarounds. How much heat? and how much noise? and do you have a way to measure the radeon board fan speed?

[stevepusser]

I've never heard of a graphical control center for amdgpu or the radeon driver; I assume you'd instead add options to a conf file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ to configure the driver, the same as for all the other free drivers.

[khelben1979]

I'm using: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.12 Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver. OS: Debian Jessie with latest security updates.
As for performance and settings, I'm perfectly happy with how things are now regarding the drivers. The fan of the computer has been
configured by BIOS and the AMD software does not touch those settings. My settings is set at only start when it get's too warm, I'm using
a laptop cooler as well..

So the only thing I'm wondering over here is how to edit that config file in order to get the free open source driver to work as good as my
current non free driver does with Jessie? That would be interesting, I can do without GUI, but it would have been nice to have!

As for testing the new Debian 9, I burnt a Live CD and tested it. The graphics and everything worked good from the start, but the laptop made
much noise because it was using the inbuilt graphics card instead of the graphics chipset, so that's not acceptable.

[bw123]

I looked up "AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.12 Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver" on the web and found the installer pretty easy. I did not find one for debian specifically, but did find an Ubuntu page with links to it. I don't know if it would work on stretch, and ATI/AMD are pretty famous for having confusing versions of their drivers. Their documentation would probably be the best place to find an answer to your question.

Why don't you follow up with some better machine specs, including lspci info and xrandr output. Some people might find it helpful.
https://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo

If I was in your situation I would probably set up a stretch install on another partition and test it for awhile, and keep the jessie install so you can use it until you figure out the best way to upgrade.

Using proprietary drivers is going to make upgrades complicated. In the long run, once the graphics board becomes "legacy" the proprietary drivers will leave you stranded, with no upgrade path.

[khelben1979]

Yes, I don't intend to use non-free graphics drivers with Debian 9. Making a dist upgrade will break my current graphics drivers, I'm very certain of that! So that will be a mess I'm gonna take care of manually once I make a dist upgrade. My Carrizo chipset is fully supported by the open source Radeon driver, and that's the one I'm going for. I just need a way to make it work as good as my current non-free driver does, in the way that I can fully disable the graphics card, so far that seems to be the main issue over here. Other issues could be that some old software starts to malfunction due to updated libraries, but those things should have been tested by the Debian developers i.m.o.

My laptop is this:
HP Pavilion Notebook 15-ab064no-Nordic (model from august 2015)

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I don't intend to use non-free graphics drivers with Debian 9. Making a dist upgrade will break my current graphics drivers, I'm very certain of that!

Remove the xorg configuration file and the blacklist that the proprietary installation applies to the free drivers; I think amdgpu may need a kernel parameter to be activated, there was a recent thread about that here.

[milomak]

I'm using: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.12 Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver. OS: Debian Jessie with latest security updates.
As for performance and settings, I'm perfectly happy with how things are now regarding the drivers. The fan of the computer has been
configured by BIOS and the AMD software does not touch those settings. My settings is set at only start when it get's too warm, I'm using
a laptop cooler as well..

So the only thing I'm wondering over here is how to edit that config file in order to get the free open source driver to work as good as my
current non free driver does with Jessie? That would be interesting, I can do without GUI, but it would have been nice to have!

As for testing the new Debian 9, I burnt a Live CD and tested it. The graphics and everything worked good from the start, but the laptop made
much noise because it was using the inbuilt graphics card instead of the graphics chipset, so that's not acceptable.

what does your xorg.conf look like?

is this below likely a result of running sid

Code: Select all

error: Detected X Server version 'XServer 1.20.3_64a' is not supported. Supported versions are X.Org 6.9 or later, up to XServer 1.10 (default:v2:x86_64:lib:XServer 1.20.3_64a:none:4.19.2-towo.1-siduction-amd64:)
Installation will not proceed.


[khelben1979]

The xorg.conf:

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "aticonfig Layout"
Screen 0 "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0" 0 0
EndSection

Section "Module"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0"
Option "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver"
Option "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor"
Option "DPMS" "true"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "0-LVDS"
Option "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver"
Option "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor"
Option "DPMS" "true"
Option "Disable" "true"
Option "TargetRefresh" "60"
Option "Position" "0 0"
Option "Rotate" "normal"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "0-DFP1"
Option "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver"
Option "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor"
Option "DPMS" "true"
Option "PreferredMode" "2560x1440"
Option "TargetRefresh" "60"
Option "Position" "0 0"
Option "Rotate" "normal"
Option "Disable" "false"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
Driver "fglrx"
Option "Monitor-LVDS" "0-LVDS"
Option "Monitor-DFP1" "0-DFP1"
BusID "PCI:0:1:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0"
Device "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

No SID packages installed, only backports activated.

[milomak]

if you still have the downloads, could you run
./check.sh

Code: Select all

Detected configuration:
Architecture: x86_64 (64-bit)
X Server: XServer 1.20.3

[stevepusser]

Code: Select all

Section "Device"
Identifier "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
Driver "fglrx"
Option "Monitor-LVDS" "0-LVDS"
Option "Monitor-DFP1" "0-DFP1"
BusID "PCI:0:1:0"
EndSection


The fglrx driver does not work with anything newer than Jessie.

[milomak]

Code: Select all

Section "Device"
Identifier "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
Driver "fglrx"
Option "Monitor-LVDS" "0-LVDS"
Option "Monitor-DFP1" "0-DFP1"
BusID "PCI:0:1:0"
EndSection


The fglrx driver does not work with anything newer than Jessie.

i suspected this

[llivv]

unless it's in jessie backports
jessie still uses ati
man ati
info ati

the available settings are in the man page
man amdgpu
info amdgpu

/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/11-amdgpu.conf

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Section "Device"
Identifier "ati-0"
Driver "amdgpu"
EndSection


Xorg -configure
X -config /root/xorg.conf.new
man amdgpu
unless the autogenerated conf files does everything you need

all the proprietary blob needs to be purged before the free driver will work correctly.
https://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo

[khelben1979]

I still haven't upgraded my Debian 8 system over here to version 9, but I have a question:

Editing /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf to add:
blacklist amdgpu

As root:
update-initramfs -u

Also removing the text configuration file for the X server as previously mentioned, should this do it? I've gone through multiple steps to insure myself of a not too problematic upgrade over here, but as you can see, I decided to wait for another year before attempting this. This will insure that I'm upgrading to a more stable and mature system as I do.

[CwF]

It's a chicken egg issue I think, I've moved some machines to amdgpu while upgrading to buster and one snag is what driver supports you graphics. The radeon and amdgpu drivers overlap their support, but I can't answer what versions do what. For buster I used the 19.0.1-1 amdgpu from bullseye, before 18.1.99 was in buster. In the transition I needed to use the tty terminal more than once.

Instead of blacklisting, declare driver support in /etc/modprobe.d/amdgpu.conf and /etc/modprobe.d/radeon.conf.
options are:

Code: Select all

/etc/modprobe.d/amdgpu.conf
options amdgpu si_support=1
options amdgpu cik_support=1
/etc/modprobe.d/radeon.conf
options radeon si_support=0
options radeon cik_support=0

0 tuns off support, 1 turns it on. You can get to this file from the terminal and edit, maybe starting with radeon=1 and amdgpu=0 until things are in place. The commits in amdgpu for my uses were in April '19 maybe, so I don't think Jessie or Stretch drivers are ready for the swap.

I'd think a full upgrade to buster is in order. After that big step, you 'may' have some support for tweaking if /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level exist in your final configuration.
Investigate /sys/class/drm/card0/device/pp_power_profile_mode
and /sys/class/drm/card0/device/hwmon/hwmon1/power1_cap