AMDVLK

AMDVLK (AMD Open source Driver for Vulkan) is an open-source Vulkan driver for AMD Radeon™ graphics adapters on Linux led by the GPUOpen initiative.

AMDVLK can work with the AMDGPU driver or on a headless system. It also greatly supports interoperability with the mesa RADV driver.

Prerequisites

Source-based or prebuilt?

In 2023, it became clear that source-based driver is very difficult to maintain due to it's big requirements. So media-libs/amdvlk-bin was introduced. This is the ported driver binary from RHEL/Debian built by AMD itself. It does not require compilation, so it can be installed easily, but still provides more than 90% performance of source-based one.

At this moment there are two possible variants:

media-libs/amdvlk for compiling from source code.
media-libs/amdvlk-bin provides binaries built by AMD itself.

it's recommended to seek for media-libs/amdvlk-bin first.

Hardware detection

Follow the hardware detection guide on the AMDGPU page if in doubt.

Choosing the right driver version

Starting from 2023.Q4.1 AMDVLK dropped support for old Pre-GFX10 GPU models. To support old hardware and to reduce the e-waste, an AMDVLK maintainer has decided to keep those old versions as separate slot called legacy-polaris.

Check the AMDVLK page on GitHub for the actual supported hardware.

Mainline supported models (:0 slot)

It is supporting the following (since 2024.Q1.1):

Radeon™ RX 7900/7800/7700/7600 Series
Radeon™ RX 6900/6800/6700/6600/6500 Series
Radeon™ RX 5700/5600/5500 Series
Radeon™ Pro W5700/W5500 Series

Legacy supported models for :legacy-polaris slot

The last driver which supports legacy graphics cards is 2023.Q3.3. It supports vulkan 1.3.264 with the following GPUs:

Radeon™ RX Vega Series
Radeon™ RX 400/500 Series
Radeon™ Pro WX 9100, x200 Series
Radeon™ Pro W5700/W5500 Series
Radeon™ Pro 400/500 Series (probably?)

Although the "2023.Q3.3" also supports modern GPUs, in general it is not the best fit for them.

Very old models for :legacy-si slot

This is very old driver (3y+ old), it only support vulkan version 1.2.179 and is added primary as an experiment. It supports:

Radeon™ R5/R7/R9 200/300 Series
Radeon™ RX 400/500 Series
Radeon™ M200/M300/M400 Series
Radeon™ HD 8000M Series
Radeon™ HD 7000 Series
AMD FirePro™ Workstation Wx000/Wx100/Wx300 Series

All of these GPUs is more than 8 years old.

Vulkan ICD

The driver automatically pulls the vulkan ICD loader package. Check the Vulkan page for more information on choosing a Vulkan driver.

Vital preparations

Enable the GURU ebuild repository

Important
The Gentoo Security team warns: GURU repository packages are manually reviewed by trusted contributors. However, the repository is primarily maintained by other users. It's not recommended to use this repository on hardened systems, in a critical environment, or if the testing (~amd64) packages is prohibited.

The AMDVLK packages can be found in the GURU overlay. It's maintained by User:RarogCmex. Follow the guide Project:GURU/Information for End Users to enable GURU ebuild repository.

Turn on DRI3 and disable modesetting X driver

Note
This section is for Xorg users only. Wayland users can skip this section.

On systems that use Gentoo's mainline AMDGPU driver stack, there is a high chance that all necessary stuff is already available: DRI3 and xf86-video-amdgpu driver configured and installed. If not, follow the Xorg/Hardware_3D_acceleration_guide and AMDGPU to configure it. Generally, the following lines may need to be added to the xorg.conf file:

FILE /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "Device"
Identifier "AMDgpu"
Option  "DRI" "3"
EndSection

Ensure that there is no Driver "modesetting" line in the xorg.conf file.

Installation

Binary driver

Add ::GURU, then install it with the right slot version:

For mainline:

root #emerge --ask media-libs/amdvlk-bin:0

For legacy-polaris:

root #emerge --ask media-libs/amdvlk-bin:legacy-polaris

For legacy-si:

root #emerge --ask media-libs/amdvlk-bin:legacy-si

That's all.

Source-based driver

media-libs/amdvlk has a USE flag to add wayland support. If wayland support is necessary then be sure to set the flag and re-emerge:

root #emerge --ask media-libs/amdvlk

After installation Xorg or Wayland may require re-configuring.

Raytracing support and DXC

media-libs/amdvlk since 2022.4.3 support raytracing via corresponding use flag and requires the dev-util/DirectXShaderCompiler package from the GURU overlay to build its support. However, for compatibility purposes, it's generally recommended to always keep this flag enabled, unless there's a (weak) CPU limitation.

Additional system requirements to build

16 GiB of RAM is recommended to successfully build the AMDVLK driver from source. However, on systems with less than 16 GiBs of RAM, one workaround may be building the driver using a single thread; i.e. MAKEOPTS="-j1". You may have to play around with different compilation flags, depending on your system. Use CHECKREQS_DONOTHING=1 to bypass the memory checking during installation (check-reqs.eclass).

For example, this can be performed in a one-shot from the command-line as follows:

root #CHECKREQS_DONOTHING=1 MAKEOPTS="-j1" emerge --ask media-libs/amdvlk

UPD: There are successful experiments building it in a VM with the "-O1" optimization flag and 6GB RAM

Configuration and features

Mesa RADV interoperability

AMDVLK can be simultaneously installed with mesa's RADV driver. If RADV is also installed in the system, the AMDVLK driver will be enabled by default after installation. It's possible to switch between AMDVLK and RADV by setting an environment variable AMD_VULKAN_ICD=AMDVLK or AMD_VULKAN_ICD=RADV.

Runtime settings

The driver exposes many settings that can customize the driver's behavior and facilitate debugging. Settings can be added into the amdVulkanSettings.cfg or amdPalSettings.cfg files under one of the paths below, formatted with one name/value pair per-line:

/etc/amd
${AMD_CONFIG_DIR}

See the AMDVLK Github Page for the full list of settings.

Headless usage

AMDVLK can be installed and used on headless systems to run headless Vulkan applications (e.g. waifu2x-ncnn-vulkan).

Troubleshooting

Wrong ELF class

That misleading error occurs if using a multilib system. See the Vulkan#Wrong_ELF_class.

Known issues and limitations

See GitHub page.

The package maintainer (User:RarogCmex) warns about:

Usage with DRI_PRIME with lead nvidia GPU is impossible at this moment because the driver does not work with modesetting.

Known issues for mainline driver

If you are using upstream stack, you may need to upgrade the kernel to 5.3 or later version and firmware (under /lib/firmware/amdgpu/) to the right version (sys-kernel/linux-firmware), and then update initramfs
Timeline semaphore is not fully supported in Linux kernel until version 5.5. You can install Vulkan timeline semaphore layer to enable the extension if you are using earlier version of Linux kernel

Known issues for :legacy-polaris and :legacy-si

CTS may hang in VK.synchronization.internally_synchronized_objects.pipeline_cache_compute with Linux kernel versions lower than 4.13
The driver can only work with firmware of ME feature version >= 25 (it is possible to check the version with command "sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/amdgpu_firmware_info"). If using upstream stack with GPUs of SI or CI family, it may needed to upgrade the kernel to 4.19 or later version and firmware (under /lib/firmware/amdgpu/) to the right version from https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/amdgpu, and then update ramfs (sudo mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-`uname -r` `uname -r`)
Timeline semaphore is not fully supported in Linux kernel until version 5.5. It is possible to install Vulkan timeline semaphore layer to enable the extension if using earlier version of the Linux kernel.