How to determine if graphics is supported by radeondrm?

[Rhialto]

I'm looking for a new computer (my current one is 10 years old or so)
and I'm wondering how I can determine if a certain graphics chipset is
supported currently by NetBSD. With "supported" I mean that
accelleration works at least for playing movies and GL- stuff such as
done by emulators such as fs-uae and vice.

For example, if I look at an "AMD Ryzen 3" cpu, which supposedly has
integrated graphics "AMD Radeon Vega 8, integrated GPU". Grepping -i for
"Vega" in src/sys/external/bsd/drm2/dist/drm yields no results; I take
it this is a bad sign?

Am I better off looking at iNtel stuff?

-Olaf.

[Lloyd Parkes]

HI all,

Post by Rhialto
For example, if I look at an "AMD Ryzen 3" cpu, which supposedly has
integrated graphics "AMD Radeon Vega 8, integrated GPU". Grepping -i for
"Vega" in src/sys/external/bsd/drm2/dist/drm yields no results; I take
it this is a bad sign?

I booted a live image of 9.1 that I found on my Ryzen 3 laptop and it
ends up running the Vesa driver with the "llvmpipe" OpenGL renderer. The
Xorg log file shows that X thought about the AMD driver, but ended up
using the VESA one. The log shows a long list of AMD GPU models, which
looks like Xorg's way of saying that it doesn't know what model of AMD
GPU I have.

Linux says the laptop has "AMD Ryzen 3 3300U with Radeon Vega Mobile
Gfx" and Google tells me this is a Picasso/Radeon Vega 6.

I found the file amdgpu_device.c with the amdgpu_asic_name definition at
the top. NetBSD has many, many entries missing from this list. :-(

I also tried my Intel based laptop, but I only had an MBR image and HP
seemed to have removed the old BIOS boot option in their newer firmware
so I couldn't even boot the image.

Lloyd


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[Rhialto]

Post by Lloyd Parkes
HI all,

Post by Rhialto
For example, if I look at an "AMD Ryzen 3" cpu, which supposedly has
integrated graphics "AMD Radeon Vega 8, integrated GPU". Grepping -i for
"Vega" in src/sys/external/bsd/drm2/dist/drm yields no results; I take
it this is a bad sign?

I booted a live image of 9.1 that I found on my Ryzen 3 laptop and it ends
up running the Vesa driver with the "llvmpipe" OpenGL renderer. The Xorg log
file shows that X thought about the AMD driver, but ended up using the VESA
one. The log shows a long list of AMD GPU models, which looks like Xorg's
way of saying that it doesn't know what model of AMD GPU I have.

Thanks for doing the experiment. I guess it tells us what I already
feared, that it doesn't do accelleration.

I think that the long list of AMD GPU models is simply always printed by
the AMD driver ("Look at all the models I support!") and then later it
decides if it really supports the GPU that's there. For instance on my
current box, it reports at some point after the long list:

[ 34.593] (--) RADEON(0): Chipset: "ATI Radeon HD 5450" (ChipID = 0x68f9)

(or maybe that's only because I have told X to use the Radeon driver and
not the modesetting driver...)

Post by Lloyd Parkes
Linux says the laptop has "AMD Ryzen 3 3300U with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx"
and Google tells me this is a Picasso/Radeon Vega 6.
I found the file amdgpu_device.c with the amdgpu_asic_name definition at the
top. NetBSD has many, many entries missing from this list. :-(
I also tried my Intel based laptop, but I only had an MBR image and HP
seemed to have removed the old BIOS boot option in their newer firmware so I
couldn't even boot the image.

Thanks for doing the experiment!

Post by Lloyd Parkes
Lloyd

-Olaf.

[matthew green]

radeondrm does not support any modern graphics card, and
we don't have a working amdgpu driver yet (last i tried,
it hung at boot and i did not have a serial console setup
to test with yet.)

you can have almost OK stuff with the vesa driver. maybe
wsfb also can work.

we're working (slower than hoped) on a drm update, but we
do not have any ETA currently.


.mrg.

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[Rhialto]

Post by Lloyd Parkes
I also tried my Intel based laptop, but I only had an MBR image and HP
seemed to have removed the old BIOS boot option in their newer firmware
so I couldn't even boot the image.

I just tried the 9.1 image on my ASUS UX550V laptop and it did load a proper
GLX renderer for the Intel GPU. I hadn't tried that laptop initially because
it also has an nVidia GPU in it, but then I realised that NetBSD will
probably ignore the nVidia GPU and it did.

Ah yes. I looked up that model and it seems to have a "Intel Core
i7-7700HQ" CPU in it, which (because of the 7xxx number) is apparenly of
the 7th generation, which is apparently the latest that NetBSD has
support for.

None of the trackpads on my laptops worked with the NetBSD image I was using
and I did not look into why.

Weird..

Lloyd

Thanks,
-Olaf.

[Lloyd Parkes]

Post by Lloyd Parkes
I also tried my Intel based laptop, but I only had an MBR image and HP
seemed to have removed the old BIOS boot option in their newer
firmware so I couldn't even boot the image.

I just tried the 9.1 image on my ASUS UX550V laptop and it did load a
proper GLX renderer for the Intel GPU. I hadn't tried that laptop
initially because it also has an nVidia GPU in it, but then I realised
that NetBSD will probably ignore the nVidia GPU and it did.

None of the trackpads on my laptops worked with the NetBSD image I was
using and I did not look into why.

Cheers,
Lloyd


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[nia]

as previously mentioned, the "radeon" DRM/KMS driver supports
only older AMD GPUs - mostly everything of the TeraScale family.

we do not yet have a working port of the "amdgpu" driver for
newer stuff in 9.x or -current.

until last year, I was happily using a Radeon HD 6570.
this is a GPU introduced in 2011 with TeraScale 2 and DisplayPort,
available in low-profile forms. I had trouble finding open source
software that would not run at 1080p.

several NetBSD developers like the Radeon HD 5450 because it is
fanless.

Post by Rhialto
Am I better off looking at iNtel stuff?

if you want a newer integrated GPU, yes, in 9.x we support everything up
to (including) Kaby Lake, which is hardware that debuted in 2016 and
was discontinued for desktop processors in 2020.

if you want a better CPU and are happy with an older external GPU,
i would not advise getting Intel stuff.

newer x86 hardware supports a generic unaccelerated full resolutoin
dumb UEFI framebuffer. llvmpipe (the software OpenGL driver) will be
chosen when this is in use. llvmpipe is very good on CPUs with lots
of cores and threads, it is highly paralell.

hope this helps,
nia

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