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

Thu Aug 6 13:03:12 EDT 2020

>I spent around $135 on a spiffy cool AMD Radeon RX 570 at my friendly
local Micro Center.

I always thought this card was a good value.  I have a bunch running in
machines here at home.  I also love not having to mess with Nvidia drivers!

Not sure if you are into RGB bling in your rigs, but sometimes I get
carried away. There are some nifty backplates for that GPU as well:
https://www.v1tech.com/product-category/backplates/rgb-gpu-backplates/

yahoo!

On Wed, Aug 5, 2020 at 3:36 PM Charles Shapiro via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> 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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