hw writes:
On Sun, 2022-12-04 at 09:06 -0700, Charles Curley wrote: > On Sun, 04 Dec 2022 15:52:31 +0100 > hw <hw@adminart.net> wrote: > > > so I wanted to have Debian on a Precision R7910 with AMD graphics card > > and it failed because it refuses to use the amdgpu module. I tried > > forcing to load it when booting and it still didn't work. > > > > So I'm stuck with Fedora. What's wrong with Debian that we can't even > > get AMD cards to work. > > Before I get started with some questions to help you debug the problem, > did you want some serious debugging assistance, or did you simply want > to whine? I'm not whining, I was merely telling. There must be quite a few people using AMD cards who must have been running into the same problem.
Debian stable is not usually adding support for new hardware during its lifecycle. Hence the standard way to deal with such things is to either buy hardware that is already old enough to be supported by Debian stable or to install a newer release/kernel. A new kernel has been suggested in the thread already and is a “standard thing” to try out in case of newer-than- distribution hardware. As are backported firmware blobs if you use them... :)
For instance, I am using Debian stable right now on a (smaller) Dell Workstation with an “AMD Radeon Pro W5500” which is old enough to be supported by it out of the box already. When I bought it, I installed the back-then Debian Testing Bullseye specifically because I knew that the stable distribution might have been too old (and it was shortly before the release of Bullseye anyways).
Since I needed Vulkan support and enhanced GPU performance for certain (less-important) applications, I installed some parts of the proprietary driver package. This is not officially supported and I expect it to be prone to breakage upon upgrades etc.
I can't very well debug this any further since I need the machine working, so I installed Fedora instead, and I also have currently an NVIDIA card installed. After experiencing Debian, I'm no longer really inclined to use it on workstations. I'm re-considering Gentoo, but that has had overwhelming problems in the past with updating which I don't want to have again.
If Fedora works for you now, you could also just stay with it until any reason to switch to Debian pops up or a good chance to switch manifests? IOW: No need to rush things while the computer is working as expected :)
Unless you keep upgrading to the newest hardware, it may also be a good point in time to switch to a new Debian stable that is newer than the hardware once that is released? Using a new release rather than only a newer kernel has the advantage of coming with a newer graphics stack (X11/Mesa/etc.) that may also be relevant for the GPU to function properly.
In my experience, Debian works well across various workstation brands (HP, Dell, Fujitsu) but here, the hardware was often older than the software.
HTH Linux-Fan öö [...]
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