How does one get a RX Vega card working on linux

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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Hey all,

I’ve been crawling through articles and tutorials on how to get AMD cards running on a Linux system, however only some cards are compatible even with newer cards. I possess a AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics card, but I am unable to find a solution to get it working on consumer Linux operating systems besides ubuntu.

I run fedora, and I love it, if there’s anyone who can help me I would be greatly appreciated!

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What’s the issue your having?

I think @wendell had this card on fedora?

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The system is not registering it, such as it doesn’t know it’s model through lspci and the X11 config is scarce and refuses to accept options.

I am happy to do a clean install to invalidate other variables. Here are some of the sources I’ve come across:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon-vega-setup&num=1

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rx-vega-linux1&num=2

I may be doing this wrong…

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@Eden I think wendell was running the RC version of the 4.15 kernel, which isn’t exactly suitable for beginners to do

Not an expert but isn’t, RX Vega support (Official Support) supposed to come with Kernel 4.15, which is still (RC) release candidate ? so unless you want to compile it yourself or try the rc version (Which i wouldn’t recommend for beginners)

through phoronix or something, i guess you’ll have to wait a little for the official release of kernel 4.15 which is supposed to come with freesync support and more. Not sure if there is an official release date on the Kernel release yet, it should be a massive update for AMD in general from what i’ve read

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The newest kernel and not using linux mint.

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He was doing 4.15 (I think it was RC2 at the time), but from memory, 4.14 should work as well.

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4.14 will work. You will have limited GPU acceleration.

If you are intending to game with it, either compile your own 4.15 rc kernel or better, use asdf’s 14.4 staging kernel.

You will then need to upgrade mesa and llvm

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There is some useful info in this video.

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So meta!

2 Likes
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Thanks for the replies guys!

I’ll take a look at the video and continue searching for solutions.

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As it looks like you need 4.15 Linux for Vega support, you could potentially try the fedora rawhide kernel. Fedora provide a repo for the rawhide kernel only, usually for testing etc.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RawhideKernelNodebug

Keep in mind, you will lose secure boot support, so would probably need to disable this if you’ve been using it first.

the AMD cards do rely on an up to date mesa, llvm, etc. as well, so no guarantee just the kernel alone is enough.