I have been playing around with Kubuntu with Plasma on my PC with the 15.10 release for a few months and then decided to upgrade to 16.04. Big mistake!! I have an R9 270 and once the upgrade was finished my desktop performance was terrible. Felt like dragging the mouse cursor through treacle. Doing some research showed me that the fglrx drivers were being removed in preparation for the new AMDGPU drivers and that I shouldn't upgrade if running AMD cards. I should have looked into this before I updated but its all about the learning curve with Linux anyway. Last night I downloaded and installed the latest AMDGPU-PRO Beta drivers to see if this would help and now all I get is a white screen on startup!!
Does anyone have some thoughts on where I should look to see what display drivers are loaded? I can ctrl+alt to a TTY to get CLI control but I am at a loss as to which configuration files I should be looking at. Should I look at Xorg configs or could it be the display manager?
Any help is appreciated.
First of all, uninstall the AMDGPU-PRO drivers with
sudo amdgpu-pro-uninstall
(from AMD's website)
From the look of it, your graphics card is not currently supported by the driver. Your card is based on GCN 1.0 while the driver only (officially) supports GCN 1.2. I have heard there are plans to add support for 1.0 in the future but you'll have to wait for that.
After that, I would suggest backing up your home directory and doing a fresh install of Kubuntu. If you NEED fglrx, maybe install 14.04 since it's still supported until early 2019
White screen on startup = MUTTER
I discovered the AMDGPU-PRO drivers don't work with mutter, try changing to Compton (better anyway) and that will resolve itself.
You can force X to run in software window manager mode by uninstalling mutter also (if you don't want to remove the drivers), after that install compton or another window manager other then mutter and enable it and it should be good.
Sorry I can't remember the command to select window managers.
The AMDGPU-PRO drivers do work with a 270x (according to reports).
Thanks for the options.
I could re-install Kubuntu as I have only been playing around with it and won't lose anything important, but I wanted to try and fix the problem for my own education.
I will look into the Mutter and Compton options tonight.
Update.
Mutter pkg not installed.
Tried to reinstall the plasma desktop nd kubuntu desktop along with the xserver and sddm.
Install process flagged errors with xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu-pro.
These errors included:
Cycle found while processing triggers and triggers looping, abandoned.
Any thoughts on what to try next?
Update.
Spent time web browsing and found someone who had a similar problem (they had an intel graphics driver issue). I found out that after the Kubuntu logo splash when the screen goes all white I am still able to enter my login password. This gets me into my plasma desktop.
From there I was able to purge the fglrx drivers and I was able to re-install the AMDGPU-PRO drivers.
All appeared to work correctly but when I query the garphics drivers through lshw -C I am told that the graphics is UNCLAIMED and no driver is being used. A reboot results in the same white screen so something is not playing well with SDDM.
Does anyone know which Xorg configuration file selects the graphics driver?
This Linux stuff is hard, frustrating and a heap of fun.
I'm using 16.04 MATE and the only issue I had was amdgpu cik not enabled, did u try installing kernel4.6 compile it and enable cik?
I did haft to reinstall the amdgpu-pro driver also before it worked.
What window manager you using? did you check in tty glxinfo to see if the driver is working regardless of X?
I haven't checked with glxinfo, something to try when I get home from work.
I think the windows manager is KWin as I haven't tried to replace it. It will be the stock WM from Kubuntu 15.10.
I have not tried recompliling the kernel. I'm learning a lot about linux but haven't look into kernel compiling yet but will give it a shot. Do you have any good resources that explain the steps I could look at.
I forgot to ask, did you add your user to group video before installing driver? they mention howto do that in doc.
Yes, my user has been added to the video group.
Ho, I didn't know about these AMDGPU drivers. Thanks for the post.
does the file: /etc/X11/xorg.conf exist? if so, it should be there.
Actually it uses /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/01-amdgpu-pro.conf (assuming using pro driver).
Mine just looks like below (nothing exciting).
Section "Files"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/amdgpu-pro/xorg/modules"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
ModulePath "/usr/lib64/xorg/modules"
EndSection
Section "Module"
Load "dri2"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Monitor Model"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "amdgpu"
#BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "DRI3" "1"
Option "TearFree" "on"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 1
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 4
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 8
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 15
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection
For completion here some other info you may find useful to compare/troubleshoot with:
theriddick@underverse:/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d$ glxinfo | grep OpenGL
OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon (TM) R9 390 Series
OpenGL core profile version string: 4.5.13439 11.3.0 ofile Context
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 4.50
OpenGL core profile context flags: (none)
OpenGL core profile profile mask: core profile
OpenGL core profile extensions:
OpenGL version string: 4.5.13439 11.3.0 bility Profile Context
OpenGL shading language version string: 4.50
OpenGL context flags: (none)
OpenGL profile mask: compatibility profile
OpenGL extensions:
OpenGL ES profile version string: 4.5.13439 11.3.0 bility Profile Context
OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: 4.50
OpenGL ES profile extensions:
theriddick@underverse:~/Desktop$ ldconfig -p | grep libEGL
libEGL.so.1 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/amdgpu-pro/libEGL.so.1
libEGL.so.1 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa-egl/libEGL.so.1
libEGL.so.1 (libc6) => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/amdgpu-pro/libEGL.so.1
libEGL.so.1 (libc6) => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa-egl/libEGL.so.1
I'm using Kernel 4.6 with CIK enabled, its custom built so if your using a older one then I dunno. CIK may not be needed but mine worked the second I enabled that kernel flag so I dunno.... Also I'm unsure if the pro driver needs Vulkan from LunarG website installed or not(to work), I just did it incase.
I'm also using Oibaf drivers from his PPA, not sure if that matters...(amdgpu-pro might be using some of its stuff I dunno)
Thanks for the extra info.
I'll try and muck around with my system over the next few days.