AMD GPU on Arch Linux

[Tralen]

Greetings,

 

I'm an old time Houdini user, but never posted here before. I'm currently facing issues on getting Houdini working at home, where I updated an old HD 6950 to a RX 560. I used the closed source fglrx driver and the setup worked perfectly, but now, I'm at a loss on how to deal with the new amdgpu driver. The closed source amdgpu-pro seems impossible to work, it requires a special kernel, which I was able to build, a special version of mesa, which again I managed to build, and manual editing of the PKGBUILD, because it refers to a version of the driver that is no longer available. Even after all the steps, I still can't get OpenGL to work, glxinfo fails to find anything at all. On the other hand, Houdini doesn't seem to work with the open source driver, so I ask if anyone is able to use Houdini with an AMD board on Arch, and if you can provide any assistance.

 

Thank you.

[lukeiamyourfather]

If you're okay with using another distribution like Ubuntu or something Ubuntu based they come with the drivers already in the repositories. No shenanigans or compiling involved. I get the appeal of Arch Linux but I guess having to compile things to get work done on a production system is where I draw the line.

[Tralen]

Well, for now, I'm still motivated enough to try. I would rather not change my home setup from Arch, which has been working for many years. Can you confirm that the closed source driver is necessary for Houdini? I'm trying to verify if I did something wrong when I uninstalled the old driver, I should at least be able to run Houdini with HOUDINI_OGL_CORE_PROFILE=1, with very poor quality.

 

 

Thank you, Luke.

[lukeiamyourfather]

22 hours ago, Tralen said:

Can you confirm that the closed source driver is necessary for Houdini?

Sort of... I would go with the proprietary drivers. More details on what works or doesn't work is on the X.org website. It probably would "work" but it would be a lot slower even if all of the features were functional.

https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/

 

[Tralen]

Thank you, Luke, this settles the situation then. It is ironic that I moved to Arch, some years ago, exactly because the proprietary drivers for my old card were dropped from Ubuntu and the rest, the only way to get Houdini running with it was to install the driver from the AUR.

Well, for anyone trying to install the drivers on Arch, the situation is hopeless. The 4.9-kallsyms kernel builds properly, but mesa won't. It needs to link against a particular version of llvm, but is unable to build with it, so simply downgrading it won't help. To compound the problem, the last update to glibc breaks everything, and downgrading it requires downgrading gcc and gcc-libs which can pretty much break the whole system. The AUR maintainers of the driver and the patched mesa seem unresponsive, which can be expected since the community is satisfied with the open source driver performance (for games).

I migrated the system to Ubuntu 18.04, and found the situation even worse. With the proprietary drivers, I'm not even able to login.

 

I'm at a loss.

Thanks for any assistance.

 

Edit: It seems the proprietary driver only works with Ubuntu 16.04. I think I will return the board, get a nvidia and go back to Arch.

Edited April 29, 2018 by Tralen

[lukeiamyourfather]

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS came out a few days ago so it might take a couple of weeks for drives to get worked out. Your timing is shit.

[Tralen]

On 5/1/2018 at 3:07 PM, lukeiamyourfather said:

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS came out a few days ago so it might take a couple of weeks for drives to get worked out. Your timing is shit.

Yes, I changed the board in the worst possible time. The updates that broke everything on Arch were all recent and I was out of pace with what was happening on the Ubuntu side. Still, I got an iso of Ubuntu 16.04.3 and managed to get Houdini running. I'm glad I didn't return the board because AMD is at least doing a lot of investment in open source, even if their release cycle lags so much. It took them two months to release the driver for 16.04.4 (released just now), so I don't expect the driver for 18.04 to come so soon.

 

Thanks for the input and the sarcasm.