Update: Even after doing all this the system still locks up randomly when using the amdgpu driver.

I’m running dual AMD FirePro W2100 driving 3 monitors in my workstation. Since installing the cards I’ve been suffering random freezes/graphical lockups that seemed to be related to 3D. They occurred typically during an animation in gnome-shell, or when using Firefox or Chrome with hardware acceleration. Most times, I was able to recover by logging in to the machine via ssh and sending killall -HUP to the appropriate process (usually gnome-shell). Every time this happened, syslog would be full of GPU faults:

[ 2482.763707] radeon 0000:02:00.0: GPU fault detected: 146 0x0468100c
[ 2482.763708] radeon 0000:02:00.0:   VM_CONTEXT1_PROTECTION_FAULT_ADDR   0x0011173E
[ 2482.763709] radeon 0000:02:00.0:   VM_CONTEXT1_PROTECTION_FAULT_STATUS 0x0805000C
[ 2482.763710] VM fault (0x0c, vmid 4) at page 1120062, read from CB (80)
[ 2482.763713] radeon 0000:02:00.0: GPU fault detected: 146 0x0408500c
[ 2482.763714] radeon 0000:02:00.0:   VM_CONTEXT1_PROTECTION_FAULT_ADDR   0x00111744
[ 2482.763715] radeon 0000:02:00.0:   VM_CONTEXT1_PROTECTION_FAULT_STATUS 0x0805000C
[ 2482.763717] VM fault (0x0c, vmid 4) at page 1120068, read from CB (80)

I tried updating my kernel (going from Ubuntu 18.04 to 18.10 and even reinstalling with Pop!_OS 18.10 than 19.04) and updating graphics drivers using the oibaf ppa, to no avail. Finally found what seems to be the solution on HackerNews (thanks danieldk) – force the use of the newer amdgpu driver rather than the older radeon driver. The W2100 is a first-generation GCN chip and so is supported by both drivers, and radeon is chosen as the default. To force amdgpu, you need to pass the kernel flags

amdgpu.si_support=1 radeon.si_support=0 amdgpu.cik_support=1 radeon.ciksupport=0

In Ubuntu, add these to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub, then run update_grub. Pop!_OS doesn’t use grub, so you need to add each flag using kernelstub -a amdgpu.si_support=1 and repeating for each of the 4.

So far, my system seems stable since this change. I will update this post if anything changes.

One Response to “Force amdgpu instead of radeon driver on Ubuntu 19.04 (Pop!_OS 19.04)”

1. Person says:

   2020-08-20 at 22:25

   Google Chrome 84.0.4147.108 Windows 10 x64 Edition
   Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/84.0.4147.108 Safari/537.36

   Heads up, in the last flag you are setting `radeon.ciksupport=0` instead of `radeon.cik_support=0`

   Reply