VIDEO_CARDS radeonsi amdgpu - mesa

musv · Advocate Joined: 01 Dec 2002 Posts: 3365 Location: de

Hi,

I'm trying to install my new computer. Graphics card is a Powercolor RT7900XTX.

Got it working so far. No I'm trying to get vulkan and other things to work. According to the Vulkan Wiki I have to put into VIDEO_CARDS

toralf · Posted: Sat Mar 25, 2023 9:10 am Post subject:

I think you need radeonsi for some reasons. I have here an amdgpu Lenovo notebook (P14s) and have

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Mar 25, 2023 10:47 am Post subject:

musv,

There is some history here.

A long time ago, all VIDEO_CARDS did was to select the Xorg video driver to be installed. There was a simple one to one correspondence between drivers and VIDEO_CARDS entries.
Indeed, if it was left unset, no drivers were installed.

Later mesa started to use it for the acceleration it provides. That was OK at the start too.

More recently, several Xorg drivers need the same mesa acceleration. That broke the one to one correspondence.
Hence, the amdgpu driver needs the radeonsi bit of mesa.

The whole history of the PC is littered with things like that. It wasn't designed at the outset. It "just grew".
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Atha · Apprentice Joined: 22 Sep 2004 Posts: 239

I'm using VIDEO_CARDS="amdgpu radeon radeonsi nouveau dummy"
I used to have VIDEO_CARDS="amdgpu radeon radeonsi nouveau fbdev vesa dummy"

amdgpu – for amdgpu (in my case part of the processor, iGPU) X11 driver
radeon – for some legacy stuff (like readeonsi, some amdgpu stuff is included in radeon)
readeonsi – for mesa, amdgpu is supported by/included in readeonsi
nouveau – for my dedicated GPU (the kernel modules is currently disabled (blacklisted), but I want the X11 driver installed)
fbdev – to get a fallback framebuffer X11 driver
vesa – to get a fallback VESA X11 driver
dummy – for headless scenarios

For the correct VIDEO_CARDS setting, see also https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/AMDGPU#Emerge and https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/AMDGPU#Fallback_driver as well as https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ATI_FAQ

I guess I could remove "radeon" from my list... It didn't hurt to keep it, but I don't know specifically why I did.
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ritzmax72 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 10 Aug 2014 Posts: 114

Is it ok to install drivers for Nvidia and amd by using amdgpu noveau nvidia radeonsi on VIDEO_CARDs, let say for the purpose of swapping cards occassionally so that I don't have to reinstall drivers? Will it cause any conflicts?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2024 1:23 pm Post subject:

Instlling the open source drivers as you suggest is OK.
The kerlel will pick the right drivers at boot time.
You can even install both nvidia and amd cards in the same system at the same time that way.

Mixing and matching with the evil binary blob nvidia-drivers will cause conflicts, last time I heard.
That info may be out of date now. Updates welcome.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.