I need help installing AMD GPU propietary drivers on UBUNTU 17.10

Question

I currently have a Sapphire Dual X AMD R9 280x and I'm trying to install the official drivers from AMD website but I keep getting a black screen when I reboot. Does anyone have any specific instructions on how to do this successfully? Any help would be appreciated.

Solution

I had the same issues with the black screen, until I realized that my Monitor is still connected via DVI. Yep, that took me some time to find out it might be that.

When I connected to some screen via HDMI or DisplayPort, I had a screen output again. For all AMD-GPU driver versions up to 17.40 I got an error message then on the text console.
After that I realized that you can see already a compile error, when amdgpu-install tries to compile the kernel module.

BUT:
Depending on what you want to do, I saw at least some success today with the 17.50 drivers in Ubuntu 17.10.

If you want to have complete driver support, I have to admit I did not test that with driver 17.50.

But if you want to do some GPU mining or other opencl based things instead, then this is what helped me to reach this goal:

• find the driver here: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Radeon-Software-for-Linux-Release-Notes.aspx
• download the version "Radeon™ Software for Linux® Driver Version 17.50 for Ubuntu 16.04.3"
• unzip for example with "tar -xJlpvf amdgpu-pro-17.50-511655.tar.xz"
• in the created directory, run: "./amdgpu-install --headless --opencl=legacy"
• restart (maybe not necessary)
• now clinfo brings some nice information, and some mining tools work fine as well (ethminer or xmr-stak-amd)

Hope that helps!

Comments

[Daniel W.]

As I understand it there is no supported proprietary driver anymore. The radeon kernel driver should be installed by default and that's the one you should be using. Checking AMDs linux drivers download page, the latest ubuntu specific driver for your card (R9 280x) is targeted at Ubuntu 15.04 is that the one you downloaded? Or did you download the generic linux one and installed from sources? In any case your problem most likely stems from the fact that Ubuntu now uses the Wayland display server by default and these old drivers are most certainly written for X11

[thelocust]

Yes that's the one I need to get working, the one from AMD's website and not the generic ones, do you know how can I get it to work on Ubuntu 17.10?

[Admin]

* how can I get it to work on Ubuntu 17.10?* Well, the short answer version of the first comment is: No, you can't.

[Daniel W.]

I'm afraid you can't get that driver to work. It has dependencies that are over 2 years old and targets a different display environment (X11) than the one Ubuntu is using now (Wayland). The important question to me ist why you need to get it to work? Is something not working correctly with the kernel driver that is installed out of the box?

[thelocust]

I'm trying to use GPU to mine crypto.

[thelocust]

Is it possible to get this one working at least? support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/…

[thelocust]

So there's no possible way whatsoever to get any AMD proprietary drivers to work on Ubuntu 17.10 for R9 280x cards?

[Admin]

The "Compatible Operating Systems" and the "compatibility" lists answers your question and again, NO. The driver is for 16.04 only and doesn't even support your card. Again, what exactly is the problem with the default drivers? Have you already tested or you're just assuming you need proprietary drivers because some old tutorial said so? If you're experiencing errors with some software better ask about that instead of what you think is a solution, the very definition of a X-Y problem: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-proble‌​m

[thelocust]

Thanks! I actually tried this and at least it doesn't give me a black screen but when I try to run the miner it gives me this error: "amdgpu_device_initialize: DRM version is 2.50.0 but this driver is only compatible with 3.x.x. Segmentation fault (core dumped) " Any idea on how to fix this?