Troubles installing AMD drivers

Question

For the past day i have been trying to succefully install drivers for my RX470 in my system. When installing Ubuntu i already had problems installing but nomodeset dit the work for me. i also sometimes see this error when launching

ERROR VGACON disables amdgpu kernel modesetting

After installation ubuntu just boots fine, but when i try to install the drivers from the AMD website the installion finished with this at the end:

W: Possible missing firmware ...(?)

then when i reboot the system like the amd page told me to do i am not able to log in anymore.

Is there a solution to this problem?

I have tried this:

chown username:username .Xauthority sudo chmod a+wt /tmp dpkg-reconfigure lightdm sudo service lightdm restart

Answer 1

Since you did not state, I will assume that you are installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with kernel 4.4 and you are trying to use the AMDGPU-Pro driver instead of the the AMDGPU open source driver which should load by default as it comes with the kernel. If this is the case, I would reinstall Ubuntu. Make sure that you are using the latest kernel. Ubuntu 16.04.3 should be using kernel 4.10 if you have an earlier kernel you need to install the Hardware Enablement Stack (HWE) following these instructions. After upgrading to the latest kernel reboot and check which driver is installed:

lspci -k | grep -EA2 'VGA|3D|Display'

This should indicate that the kernel driver in use is "amdgpu". If it does not, then wait for a better answer, but if it does then you can proceed with installing the proprietary amdgpu-pro driver following the instructions from AMD. (Note that the fglrx proprietary driver is not supported in Ubuntu 16.04)

Answer 2

Mark's advice is extremely relevant. I tried installing amdgpu-pro-17.30-465504 multiple times without success - each time resulting in no GUI logon and "low resolution" mode message. Tried command line uninstall/reinstall with no success. Apparently despite keeping the system up-to-date, I was missing the critical hardware enablement stack. Followed the instructions and reattempted the amdgpu-pro installation with success.