[ale] Upgrading from Nvidia GT-610 to AMD Radeon RX-570 on Debian Buster

[Charles Shapiro]

I am, of course, somewhat touched that my documented adventures with
upgrading has led to a good-sized email stream on this server.   Propers to
everyone weighing in.

I am now in the throes of upgrading my video card.  I spent around $135 on
a spiffy cool AMD Radeon RX 570 at my friendly local Micro Center.  I'm
hoping to harness some of this awesome compute power for OpenCV and perhaps
even Folding at Home.  I've already started playing with OpenGL courtesy of
this excellent tutorial ( http://www.opengl-tutorial.org/ ), which has been
most interesting and fun.  Plus it's given me a chance to exercise my C
(not C++!) chops..

So my first problemo was that I was running the proprietary Nvidia drivers
for my current $70 video card, which according to lspci is:

04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF119 [GeForce GT
610] (rev a1)

The proprietary drivers were in the nvidia-legacy-390xx-driver package.
Since the new card is an AMD, I very much doubted that the nvidia
proprietary drivers would even allow me to bring up the desktop.  I wanted
to drop back to the shipped Nouveau drivers to make sure everything would
work before I installed the (still proprietary) AMD drivers.

So here's what I wound up doing:

<ctl><alt>F4 to a terminal session
Login as root
# Drop to multi-user: network connected, but no graphical desktop
systemctl isolate multi-user.target
# Uninstall the proprietary nvidia drivers
apt-get uninstall  nvidia-legacy-390xx-driver package.
# Make sure nvidia stuff is really uninstalled.
cd /etc/modprobe.d
mv nvidia-blacklists-nouveau.conf nvidia-blacklists-nouveau.conf.backup
mv nvidia.conf nvidia.conf.backup
mv nvidia-kernel-common.conf nvidia-kernel-common.conf.backup
# Reinstall nouveau packages
# nb that "drm" here means "Direct Rendering Manager"
apt-get install --reinstall libdrm-nouveau2
apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-nouveau
# Bring graphical desktop back up
systemctl isolate graphical.target
# Reboot system
# Verify that nouveau drivers are loaded
su
lsmod | grep nouveau
nouveau              2179072  31
video                  45056  1 nouveau
ttm                   131072  1 nouveau
drm_kms_helper        208896  1 nouveau
drm                   495616  24 drm_kms_helper,ttm,nouveau
i2c_algo_bit           16384  1 nouveau
mxm_wmi                16384  1 nouveau
wmi                    28672  2 mxm_wmi,nouveau
button                 16384  1 nouveau


# Take machine to basement laboratory and wrangle hardware.  Make another
visit to Micro-Center after I find out that DVI and DVI-D are Different.

On first boot, she kvetched about missing firmware.  But the desktop came
up ok fine, albeit with no desktop Effects ( I have Rotating Cube turned on
for switching desktops)

# Drop back down to multi-user:

systemctl isolate multi-user

Go through the apt commands in this excellent explainer (
https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-the-latest-amd-drivers-on-debian-10-buster
)

reboot

#Verity that amd drivers are loaded
lsmod | grep amd
amdkfd                237568  1
amdgpu               3461120  32
chash                  16384  1 amdgpu
gpu_sched              28672  1 amdgpu
i2c_algo_bit           16384  1 amdgpu
ttm                   131072  1 amdgpu
drm_kms_helper        208896  1 amdgpu
drm                   495616  25 gpu_sched,drm_kms_helper,amdgpu,ttm
mfd_core               16384  2 lpc_ich,amdgpu

# Take a look at lspci
lspci | grep VGA
04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
Ellesmere [Radeon RX 470/480] (rev ef)

#glxinfo also has something to say:
glxinfo | grep Device
glxinfo | grep Device
    Device: Radeon RX 570 Series (POLARIS10, DRM 3.27.0, 4.19.0-9-amd64,
LLVM 7.0.1) (0x67df)

I then had some additional fumbling around to get my openGL tutorials
working again.  They were failing on the GLFW initialize.  I found that
glxinfo(1) was also failing, claiming it couldn't init GLX properly.  After
some random duck-duck-go ing I found that my problem was the openGL
eXtensions.  The final clue was that the nvidia drivers replace libgl.so.0
with a proprietary version.  I installed "libgl1" ("vendor-neutral GL
dispatch library") and rebooted.  At that point, both glxinfo(1) and my
tutorials started working again. Phew!

Piglet is now just marginally noisier than she was with the old card --
this one has two fans in it, so I am up to around 7 fans total in her.
But I am all set to explore the Joys of 32 Compute Units, 2048 Stream
Processors, and 128 Texture Units!

-- CHS
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