News AMD’s Linux graphics driver is getting too big for older machines

[Admin]

Linux users are complaining that the AMD graphics driver for their OS of choice is getting so big that it is causing issues. Red Hat Linux desktop engineer Hans de Goede highlighted this issue at the weekend. Graphical boot menus are timing out before AMDGPU can load.

AMD’s Linux graphics driver is getting too big for older machines : Read more

 

[OneMoreUser]

Without at least a couple of examples of what constitutes a "older/slower systems" this article is pretty worthless.

 

[razor512]

A good solution would be to find a way to get the OS to detect some of the key hardware that would be too slow to load larger drivers in time, and then extend the timeout to 20-25 seconds. And then indicate that it is still loading GPU drivers so that the user knows what the delay is.

 

[mitch074]

A good solution would be to find a way to get the OS to detect some of the key hardware that would be too slow to load larger drivers in time, and then extend the timeout to 20-25 seconds. And then indicate that it is still loading GPU drivers so that the user knows what the delay is.

That has been explored in the bugs reports (as in, build most used GPU drivers in the kernel image), however some graphics drivers (Intel i915) have a problem with that as they expect to be loaded after some other kernel modules, and also, it makes for very large kernel images that will fail on low memory systems - something that distros like Debian wouldn't apply. Another more long term solution would be to optimize the driver's linking behavior, because while it's huge, most of its weight comes from automatically generated header files - as such, the most likely problem is on systems that still use spinning rust devices as a boot disk, because once loaded, the DRM driver checks for what it actually needs to load (chip-specific driver content and firmware) and discards the rest. This is also what allows it to recover in case of user-space driver crash.
The current most efficient workaround is, indeed, to use SimpleDRM for the boot loader - for PC, think a lightweight VESA driver that's used until the actual driver is loaded and takes over. It may cause a screen blink when the "final" driver takes over display tasks. It's already what happens with Nvidia proprietary driver.
Note that users don't get "stuck" with three dots on the screen : it simply means that Plymouth, the boot loader screen manager, times out acquiring a graphical display and stays in text mode until the boot process is done. In most cases, you can still press Esc to access the terminal boot process dump.
So, all in all, this is NOT critical - it's simply the first user-affecting bug caused by the AMDGPU's driver size ballooning. Note that this driver supports all GCN and RDNA GPUs that came out since, well, GCN 1 - the radeon DRM driver covers GCN 1 and GCN 2 while AMDGPU has only experimental support for them, but AMDGPU is also a requirement for Vulkan support.