Source
r/linuxquestions•
omento

Guidance on AMD drivers

Hello! I'm planning on purchasing a new laptop, the Lenovo T495, that'll come equipped with a Ryzen Pro 3700U APU and Vega 10 integrated graphics. This will be the first AMD based system I've ever owned, so I wanted to make sure I go into this prepared. When it comes to drivers, I'm aware that there are two main implementations, one in Mesa (so no real work required) and the other in AMDGPU which would require manual installation. For a system like this, is there any reason to go with the AMDGPU drivers?

​

Just trying to understand what to go after and expect, coming from an non-hybrid Intel/NVIDIA desktop.

Posted May 21, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

913
09f911029d7•

AMDGPU is the open source driver, part of which resides in Mesa.

AMDGPU-PRO is the proprietary driver, which runs on top of the open source AMDGPU kernel driver but replaces the Mesa driver.

The open source driver is preferable in most situations these days. It lets you run a newer kernel, which will be needed since the older 4.9 kernel that AMDGPU-PRO requires doesn't work well with Ryzen APUs. It also tends to match or beat the performance of the proprietary driver - this didn't use to be the case but a LOT of work has gone into it since 2016.

5
omentoOP•

Thank you for the correction and the information! I appreciate it.

1
nakedhitman•

The graphics drivers should not be much of an issue if you have a distro with a recent release of mesa. Your touchpad and WiFI however, might be. I have an Ideapad 530s, and getting Linux on it was rather hellish due to missing trackpad and WiFi support.

For WiFi, it turned out that the kernel drivers for the airplane mode switch were getting blocked by the ideapad_laptop kernel module, which prevents the WiFi chip from powering on. Blacklisting/unloading the kernel module allowed the device to start normally. That may not be a problem with the T series, but its something to watch out for.

The touchpad issues were due to AMD implementing a new kind of I2C touchpad system that existing drivers can't really cope with very well. Some permanent fixes are scheduled to come out with kernel 5.2 in a couple months, but there is a DKMS module you can use in the interim.

Hope that helps. If you do end up getting the T495, please do let us know what you think!

1
Zamundaaa•

Yeah WiFi support in many laptops doesn't seem to be a strong point of Linux.

For my HP laptop I had to install some manually for example. And of course that one broke with kernel 5, so I had to search for another one...

1
omentoOP•

I'm going after the Thinkpad's as they are RHEL certified[0] (at least all of the current Intel ones; Red Hat actually gives their employees T480/580/490/590 systems) and they are known to be Linux friendly. The T495 obviously won't be certified as it hasn't been released yet, but I plan on running Fedora 30 as it has the necessary 4.20+ kernel for this chipset and I don't plan on running RHEL 8 unless I have to outside of a container.

Won't know about a WiFi issue until I get it, but for your posted touchpad issue I can't tell if that's due to a touchscreen interference thing, which I definitely won't be adding on. But I'll look more into it.

I'll definitely share my findings on this machine if I do end up getting it, should be out in the next few days, which hopefully gives me enough time until I ship off to the west coast for the summer to get it in.

​

[0] https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/ecosystem/Red%20Hat%20Enterprise%20Linux?sort=sortTitle%20asc&vendors=Lenovo&category=Laptop

1
nakedhitman•

The touchpad issue is definitely not touchscreen related, as my Ideapad does not have a touchscreen. It appears to be the new way that several AMD based laptops are implementing touchpads now, as far as I can tell. Why they used the I2C bus instead of USB is beyond me. shrugs

I didn't know that Red Hat did certifications like that. Very interesting, though I don't personally care for the *hat family myself. Hope it gives you a good experience :)

1
Bardo_Pond•

Won't know about a WiFi issue until I get it

Lenovo's T495 product page says it comes with an Intel 9260, which has pretty much perfect support upstream. Intel wireless cards are in general the best choice on Linux or Windows.

1
[deleted]•

[removed]

1
SurelyNotAnOctopus•

I like to think of the graphics stacks as the following:

  • Kernel Module for the GPU (amdgpu)
  • Xorg Driver (xf86-video-amdgpu)
  • "Graphics API" (OpenGL, GTK)
  • App (Game, graphical interface)

Of course this is a *very* rought generalisation, but this is how I see the Linux Graphical Stack

1
tehfreek•

Note that OpenGL and Vulkan don't go through the Xorg driver and instead talk to the kernel DRI module directly.

1
SurelyNotAnOctopus•

I see. I suspected them to be more direct than, say, gtk and qt, for performance sake. But then how can OBS capture footage? I read its really slow to extract a video feed from the gpu

1
EddyBot•

Part of the amggpu driver are integrated into the Linux Kernel
this means you will probably need a distro with a fairly recent linux kernel most likely or wait some months if you insist on using a distro with old packages/kernel

Debian 9 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS are probably to old currently since it's a very new CPU/APU

1
Espinosidro•

Nowadays as long as you use a relatively new kernel it should work perfectly.

1