On 2021-07-10 at 11:14, Alexander V. Makartsev wrote:
> On 10.07.2021 02:44, The Wanderer wrote:
>
>> Does anyone have experience with using Vulkan with AMD graphics on
>> vaguely current Debian, using an even vaguely recent GPU? (Where
>> "vaguely current Debian" means Debian testing more recently than
>> the release of current stable, and a "vaguely recent GPU" means
>> something new enough that disabling the support for it in the
>> legacy radeon driver isn't necessary, because that driver doesn't
>> support it to begin with.)
>>
>> Any suggestions for ways to pursue getting this working, that
>> don't involve hybridizing or Frankensteining or otherwise messing
>> up my installed system?
>
> While being a "nvidia-guy" myself (long before ATI was bought by
> AMD), out of curiosity, I've asked myself "what would I do" and
> looked into AMD driver support in Debian.
I used to run NVIDIA - back in the days when G80-based cards were the
top of the architectural line. (A brother of mine, who does gaming on a
more regular basis and is at least as Linux-centric as I am, runs NVIDIA
to this day.)
I had enough times when I couldn't launch X (at least not with any
acceleration at all, even 2D acceleration) because an updated NVIDIA
driver which was compatible with the new X or kernel version hadn't been
released yet, and enough troubles trying to switch drivers etc. and
remnants left over on the computer afterwards, that it left me with an
antipathy towards using NVIDIA products.
The fact that NVIDIA's Linux support implementation is proprietary is
both the reason for those problems, and an entirely separate reason why
I decided that until that fact changes, I will never voluntarily buy an
NVIDIA card for a Linux system.
> And to my surprise, I didn't found a simple way like "amd-driver"
> meta-package to install, as opposed to "nvidia-driver" package for
> nvidia-based VGAs.
As I understand matters, this is another consequence of the fact that
the NVIDIA driver (stack) is proprietary - or rather, the only reason
why there's an nvidia-driver package is because it's not practical (or
necessarily even possible) to provide that functionality in a more
integrated way, because of the proprietary and opaque way the NVIDIA
drivers etc. are provided. In an ideal world, no such explicit separate
package(s) would be needed.
> So, if I were you, I would bite the bullet and use latest official
> driver [1] provided by AMD, simply because there are no other
> options. Upon further examination "*.deb" packages they provide will
> be installed into paths with "*/opt/*" and because of that, they
> won't overwrite any Debian-native files, so there is little to none
> possibility to create "franken-debian" by installing them. And since
> they are packaged into ".deb" files you can always cleanly uninstall
> them.
I'll take this under advisement; at the very least, it's my fallback if
other investigations don't produce any usable results. The examination
of those packages and the results they provide is appreciated.
> The only thing I would do prior to driver installation is to enable
> i386 architecture support [2] on my system, if it wasn't enabled
> already:
> # dpkg --add-architecture i386
I take this as such an obvious and necessary thing to do, during system
installation and setup, that it doesn't even occur to me to mention
having done it.
> I wonder why a convenient "amd-driver" meta-package wasn't created
> yet...
For one thing: because no one has found it worth the trouble to create
and undertake to maintain one.
For another - what would you suggest such a package do, and/or depend
on? Beyond maybe xserver-xorg-video-{amdgpu,ati,radeon} and
firmware-amd-graphics, I'm not sure what would be appropriate to pull
in, and at least some of that is going to be pulled in automatically
during installation of the OS anyway.
I certainly wouldn't mind having such a package exist, but I probably
wouldn't really use it, at the very least because
xserver-xorg-video-{ati,radeon} are not necessary for AMDGPU
functionality and I see no reason to keep them around taking up space.
--
The Wanderer
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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