That’s what I’ve been experiencing with my RX580. Complete lockups with corrupted screen as soon as I do any serious opencl calculations. I think I may contact the retailer I bought the GPU from, and see if I can return it as faulty.
The open source driver for AMD is much better than the OS driver for nVidia GPUs, cf. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/inybzn/is_amd_open_source_drivers_good/
It says you can even use the open source MESA drivers for AMD GPUs and have working OpenCL support!
In general the state of drivers in Linux is in favour of AMD in the last so many years. While nVidia is actively restricting functionality of open source drivers, AMD instead opened up and worked together to create proper, functional open source drivers. If you didn’t already, I suggest you start using that one instead of the closed source AMD driver.
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Just look at this thread:
I literally begged them to hook me up with someone from the development or qa team who could confirm and reproduce the issues I have. I’ve offered to do a qa with other software for FREE, I’ve offered to bring other people too. I’m sure they’d be willing to contribute because for the last 3 years I see the same people over and over on various amd channels whenever there is an issue. On BlackMagic, Blender, AMD, OBS forums and github issues etc. Every time the same 50 people willing to test, report help, even pay for more support.
AMD just ignored all of us. You can see how they are handling the latest issue with the driver being unable to install on 20.04. They literally excused themselves by saying that Nvidia had similar issue a while back and like wth do we expect from amd?
I’m sick and tired of that company.
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That’s not what I’ve experienced though. I’d rather use closed source drivers which work, than opensource ones which hang my system with a corrupted display…
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Well, you can’t. You can install it but if none of the apps that require it work then it’s worth shit if they claim to support something.
It’s not like you have a choice, If you have these issues you are probably doing professional work and making money from it. The issue with AMD is, open source drivers don’t work but their proprietary drivers don’t work well either! You loose every time with AMD.
I don’t like Nvidia being so closed but what choice do we have? AMD has gotten a great deal amount of unjustified good press. It might be opensource but it’s worth nothing if you can’t use it for anything more than you could do with intel integrated graphics. Which are also open source.
So I bought a top of the line, flagship AMD gpu and it’s not more usable than the integrated Intel GPU in my laptop.
Fun fact, I can run OBS and Natron on my laptop but I can’t on my desktop because of AMDs shit drivers and Linux support.
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@KristijanZic, I’m sure I came across that thread while searching my issues with opencl crashes on my RX580…
I do wish I had bought an Nvidia card though. While the nvidia I had considered may not have had as much GPU vram (6gb, vs 8gb on the RX580), it’d prbably have been working better…
Luckily I do have a spare (if somewhat old and slow) GT1030 I can swap to in the meantime to get a stable system with slow opencl acceleration.
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Did you try it like it’s explained and laid out here?
It sucks that your situation is like that, but saying that AMD sucks in Linux is just not true anymore. Maybe for you and your usecase, but that’s far from general, right?
@bestek. I’ve tried the kernel amd opensource drivers, with the amdgpu opencl drivers from the amd website. I’ve also tried using the amdgpu-pro driver and amdgpu-pro opencl driver from the amdgpu-pro package using amdgpu-install --headless, --opencl=legacy --no-dkms
I’ve also tried the kernel opensource gpu driver, with the amdgpu rocm driver installed from the amdgpu-pro package. amdgpu-pro-install --opencl=legacy,rocm.
While Opencl does work, it is very unstable, leading to the system crashing with a corrupt display.
So what has your experience been using opencl on amd gpus?
I have no experience using OpenCL on AMD GPUs in Linux, I’m just curious if there is a way to fix this problem.
Have you tried using this patch? It doesn’t seem to have gotten through yet, but maybe it’s worth a shot. It’s mentioned here again.
It is, the open source drivers that come with the kernel work well but they can’t be used for use cases harder than what an integrated GPU can be used. You know why people praise the open source drivers? Because before that it was an achievement if you could even boot your system with AMD gpu and launch display manager etc.
So now it works well for booting your system and launching guis etc but anything accelerated just doesn’t work right, ever. And why do you buy a flagship gpu? It’s not for it’s not for browsing the web or facebook. It’s for resource heavy tesks that require speed and acceleration and for use with OpenCL, HIP. And you can’t do that on Linux.
There aren’t many use cases for a high end flagship gpu. It’s for ML or rendering. Those are the only two use cases and it fails on both. I know the open source part in the kernel works well, but that’s just not the complete driver, it can’t do any acceleration, you can’t do anything more then browsing the web and even that will fail if you try something like threejs heavy apps etc.
There you go. You should try it, you’ll end up pulling all of your hair out. And if OpenCL doesn’t work then my 1000eur gpu in no better then a 20$ integrated one. Actually OpenCL works perfectly on my intel integrated gpu on my laptop.
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Well, another use case for using a big GPU in Linux would be gaming?
But that’s about it, I agree.
I wasn’t aware of the abominable state of non-gaming focussed use-cases of AMD on Linux, hence my surprise.
But it seems you’ve had your share of searching and trying and still came home with empty hamds, so I will not try and pretend it’s not a big problem. I’m sorry for saying it wasn’t.
I’m wondering why this hasn’t been picked up yet by the mainstream crowd, though. If it was, I would have known about this already. I guess OpenCL use on Linux isn’t that common enough for the word to spread.
Libre Office will take advantage of openCL.
https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
I do not know the quality of this test but given the cuda core count & frequency of a 1030, this chart place it at its place in the opencl calculation ranking : right near the bottom. I think you can’t make a bad choice upgrading your card.
If you are short on PSU wattage (as I am with a 250w PSU) most of the 1050TI or 1650 versions released by various manufacturers do not require extra power connector.
EDIT : Sorry did’nt see that the thread was that old and that the issue has been adressed a long time ago … sorry for the noise !
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No worries @clind
Seeing as I’ve now arranged a return & refund of the RX580 from the retailer (which rhymes with a certain rain forest 
I’ll be using my old GT1030 until I can buy a replacement Nvidia GPU! I recently upgraded my PSU to 750W from 500W, so any card should do. Unfortunately GPUs seem to be in short supply, however it’ll be a few days to a week before the refund gets returned to my bank account (rather than a refund as a gift voucher!) so that’ll give me more time to look around.
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Well, gaming is also rendering.
It was picked up by Blender, Resolve and Tensorflow users but it seems like it wasn’t because I guess most of the people use Nvidia for those purposes or they just move to Nvidia when they start encountering problems.
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Sad to see the heat AMD is getting here. To the best of my knowledge at least they are providing code for the upstream driver.
But I understand the frustration if things are not working. I hope that this whole OpenCL thing gets included with the open source libraries at some point.
I am writing this, as I have made very opposite experiences. I have a RX580 and a RX570 installed in two desktop systems. No issues but some power management stuff, in my hardware setup, specifically my monitor, sometimes there is no output after the display was set to power save. But that happened under Windows 10 as well. Once I figured that out, I stopped investigating and simply turn off the monitor in times of no need.
I had Ubuntu 20.04.1 and Leap 15.2 with the AMD official driver from their website running. I used the distribution delivered upstream driver and just installed the OpenCL part. darktable worked without problems with OpenCL.
If you install the amdgpu-pro-install script, dkms gets installed and a module gets compiled. If you call the script with --no-dkms , it will tell you that amdgpu-pro is only installable with dkms.
But you can call the non pro script
amdgpu-install --no-dkms --opencl=pal,legacy --headless
AMD also delivers an uninstall script to remove their installation. Reboot is recommended after doing so.
On Tumbleweed I installed rocm with the installed RX580. I basically followed that article or the thread here on the forum and adjusted everything for the recent version.
darktable works with it and blender sees the OpenCL part/graphic card properly (haven’t worked yet with blender, just set it up).
My issues were not so much with Darktable, Opencl & my RX580, but more when I was doing heavy OpenCL calculations using my RX580. Anyway, my RX580 is on it’s way back to the retailer, so hopefully I’ll buy a replacement Nvidia GPU soon.
gfx803 (which I believe the RX580 is?) no longer supported for ROCm-4.0
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From a couple of queries on my system:
rocm-opencl4.0.0 | Paket | 3.6Beta_17_g875c1f8_rocm_rel_4.0_23-1 | x86_64 | rocm
gfx803
OpenCL 1.2
Official suppot or not, for the time it seems to work on my system. But that info leaves a bit of a taste. Thanks for the heads up. Just deactivated the repo so I can manually update and see if it breaks or not
Another user with rx580 without problems. I installed it mixing open source drivers + AMDGPU pro to use openCL with darktable.
I played tomb raider with steam until the end.
Several months ago I tried to learn blender, I couldn’t learn it but it worked fine meanwhile.
Tomorrow I’ll review the link that someone shared for this setup, if it’s not the same I’ll share the link with the script that I used.
Good night 