I have a new 15-aw022nd and installed ubuntu bionic but i found out my AMD Radeon™ R7 M440 Graphics is not supported.
Who can tell me which distro to use to be able to install a working video driver for the gpu?
What do you mean by not supported? You don’t get a display? You have error messages or something?
BTW, you know that Bionic is still in alpha and not recommended unless you want to test it, report bugs and such? The current version of Ubuntu is 17.10 (Artful) and current LTS is 16.04 (Xenial).
2 Likes
Installation seems to go fine but after reboot the screen starts blinking as a blackscreen and i have to shutdown and delete the driver in recovery mode
My problem is similar to this
https://community.amd.com/thread/221355
and this
https://community.amd.com/thread/206684
and this
I understand bionic is still in alpha but it seems the driver doesnt work in any linux distro
To be clear, are you talking about the proprietary AMD driver or Mesa? If you’re not familiar with this, the situation is the following:
- on Linux, we have two kinds of drivers for most GPUs: Mesa (free/opensource, made by the community) or proprietary (closed source, made by the constructor)
- when you install Ubuntu, it uses Mesa as default but you have the possibility to install and use the proprietary driver either from the driver manager (only for nVidia) or manually from the constructor’s website (AMD or nVidia)
So, after installation and before you try to install the driver from AMD, you’re theorically using Mesa: do you have display issues at this point?
Now, if you really want to install the proprietary driver from AMD (AMDGPU-PRO), you first have to check if it handles your GPU at all (it does only for specific generations and I’m not sure yours is covered).
The other problem with AMD drivers is that they’re usually tied to a specific version of specific Linux distros. Officially, their driver is supported only for Ubuntu 16.04 (the current LTS). Unofficially, I think it can be installed fine on 16.10, maybe 17.04 and probably not on 17.10 and 18.04.
2 Likes
what I did was installing amdgpu-pro 17.50
then installation seems fine but after rebooting the blinking blackscreen issue
Ok. As I said, it’s officially supported only on Ubuntu 16.04. Given the past of AMD when it comes to drivers, i’d be very surprised that it can work on 18.04 (Bionic) now. I think it can be expected about 3 to 6 monthes after it’s officially released (I’m not joking).
I think the best plan for you is to use Mesa: do you have issues with it?
2 Likes
Ok
Im running 18,04 now which is fiberfast and I really like it .
I dont know what is MESA
does that work on 18,04 or can we test it
because it would be extremely sad if I have to downgrade to 16,04 because of this driver issue with my new laptop when my old laptop is running 17 already
Mesa is supposed to be installed and use by default. Try the following command:
glxinfo | grep OpenGL
(You might have to install the package mesa-utils before for glxinfo, I’m not sure it’s installed by default.)
2 Likes
amdgpu_parse_asic_ids: Cannot parse ASIC IDs: Resource temporarily unavailable
OpenGL vendor string: X.Org
OpenGL renderer string: AMD CARRIZO (DRM 3.19.0 / 4.14.0-15-generic, LLVM 5.0.0)
OpenGL core profile version string: 4.5 (Core Profile) Mesa 17.2.4
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 4.50
OpenGL core profile context flags: (none)
OpenGL core profile profile mask: core profile
OpenGL core profile extensions:
OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 17.2.4
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.30
OpenGL context flags: (none)
OpenGL extensions:
OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.1 Mesa 17.2.4
OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 3.10
OpenGL ES profile extensions:
Seems good. Your GPU is indeed recognized and using Mesa 17.2.4.
I’m not sure about the error message about “ASIC IDs”, if it’s a real issue or an unimportant warning.
2 Likes
so thats all we can do for now?
if i try to run steam i get:
Running Steam on ubuntu 18.04 64-bit
STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically
Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(steam)/version(0)
libGL error: unable to load driver: radeonsi_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL error: failed to load driver: radeonsi
libGL error: unable to load driver: radeonsi_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL error: failed to load driver: radeonsi
libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
That’s annoying. It looks like an old issue with Steam (which is fixable) but it might also be that you didn’t properly remove the proprietary driver and it broke Mesa.
To begin, how did you install Steam: from the Ubuntu repos or from the deb package on its website?
2 Likes
deb package i used…
Ok. We’ll uninstall it and reinstall it from the repos (the version in the Ubuntu repos has a startup script to avoid a specific issue with Mesa).
-
If you have games installed, go into ~/.local/share/Steam and move the folders “steamapps” and “userdata” on the desktop.
-
Go into ~/.local/share and delete the “Steam” folder". Go into your home dir and delete the “.steam” (hidden) folder.
-
Uninstall Steam and remove its repo:
sudo apt-get remove --purge steam-launcher
sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/steam.list
sudo apt-get update -
Install Steam from the Ubuntu repos:
sudo apt-get install steam
-
launch Steam:
steam
Does it launch properly? If it does and you backuped your installed games on the desktop (step 1), close Steam, go into ~/.steam/steam, delete the “steamapps” and “userdata” that are there and move the ones from your desktop in place.
If it does not launch properly after reinstalling the “right” version, it’s likely that your Mesa installation has been trashed. It would probably be faster to reinstall Ubuntu than to try to fix it (in which case, I’d really suggest not to install 18.04 but use 17.10).
EDIT: if you’re on a laptop, it might not be a good idea to reinstall 17.10, though. Because of the issue that can corrupt the BIOS on some laptops.
2 Likes
Ill do that later
im indeed on a laptop 15-aw022nd
but i read the topic about the bios issue but its not affecting HP laptops right but only lenovo i guess?
but i read the topic about the bios issue but its not affecting HP laptops right but only lenovo i guess?
The issue was first identified on some Lenovo laptops but there’s then been reports about other brands like Acer and Dell. I don’t know if there have been reports for HP machines but as the list of affected models is far from being definite, I’d be cautious.
2 Likes
done but
rm: cannot remove ‘/etc/apt/sources.list.d/steam.list’: No such file or directory
reinstall seems to work now
Great its really working now…
How is this possible? just by reinstalling steam?
I noticed it was rebuilding some packages completely
rm: cannot remove ‘/etc/apt/sources.list.d/steam.list’: No such file or directory
Not a problem, I think it’s automatically removed when uninstalling the steam-launcher package. I was not sure about it, so I put the command just in case.
How is this possible? just by reinstalling steam?
Steam includes a bundle of common libraries called the Steam Runtime, so that game developers don’t have to bother with users not having these libs installed. Problem is that libs from the Runtime are incompatible with Mesa. The solution is simple: delete the libs from the runtime so that Steam uses the system ones and everything works. The Steam package in the Ubuntu repos include a startup script that automatically deletes these libs so that Steam works; the package from Valve, supposed to be used on any distro, doesn’t include the same script and so it crashes. Other distros have included a Steam package too with a similar script to fix the issue.
Note that Valve has disabled the Runtime by default some time ago (it’s still possible to force its usage) to fix the issue once and for all, as most of the libs are commonly installed on most Linux PCs. But the Valve deb package hasn’t been updated. In any case, installing Steam from the Ubuntu repos should work.
It’s possible that some games have issue due to missing libs because the runtime is disabled. To fix them, the solution is to install the libs at system level from the repos, though it might be a bit trickier is some cases.
I noticed it was rebuilding some packages completely
I’m not sure what you’re talking about as, AFAIK, Steam doesn’t build anything. It installs some common packages (to make up for the disabled runtime) at first lauch, though, maybe that’s what you noticed?
2 Likes
Yes I think thats exactly what happend.
I will test it a bit but It looks fine now…
Any other things we need to check for optimal system performance?
Well, you have to know that while Mesa has made a lot of progress in the past two years, it still has worse perfs than the proprietary driver. Don’t expect to have the best perfs you can in some games. But you can’t use the proprietary driver, so there’s not really a choice here.
There are also specific issues in some games that are fixed over time. There’s a list on the GamingOnLinux wiki.
Some games are also not officially supported on AMD GPUs (even with the proprietary driver) and might not work at all.
Basically, the best way to play on Linux is with a nVidia GPU but again, not really a choice here.
Note that the developement of Mesa is very active and the driver in the Ubuntu repos are not up to date. It’s possible to have newer versions of the driver, either from the stable branch (currently 17.3.1 I think) or the developement branch. I personnaly use the PPA from Padoka for the stable branch; I wouldn’t suggest the developement version (but if you’re interested, Padoka has another PPA, there’s the one from Oibaf and there’s one maintained by the Ubuntu developers). Of course, as with every PPA, and especially for core system elements like this, it can be risky to use them and you’d better be prepared to know how to manage them properly (concrete example: when Ubuntu 17.10 was released, there was a packaging issue in Padoka’s PPA that pretty much broke the system and APT that was a real mess to fix − it’s been addressed since). Also, these PPA might not be available for Ubuntu 18.04 yet.
2 Likes