AMD Radeon 6600XT: Linux Setup Made Easy!

so you picked up a 6600 xt and your intention was to use it on linux you got a big black nothing and you ended up here welcome weary traveler this is level one i like linux and linux related things i also like graphics cards i like tinkering with things a little bit of a nerd uh i might be a reflection of your dark future let's go ahead and put together uh some instructions and talk about this card on linux because it's pretty darn good [Music] amd has launched the 6600 xt and a lot of linux users really really like amd's gpus because amd gpu it's mostly pretty much completely open mostly pretty much it works really well with steam on linux mostly pretty much and this card mostly pretty much works out of the box with the ubuntu 21.04 installer well okay i'm saying that and you're immediately like that is incorrect okay okay if you do the graphical installer the amd gpu driver sees this card kind of thinks it knows how to use this card goes to try to load this card it doesn't have the firmware and bars so you'll be stuck on the text mode console basically forever waiting for it to install and it looks like your usb drive is doing something but it's actually the display manager crashing over and over and over again fortunately the ubuntu folks have a built-in menu which is ubuntu safe mode graphics which basically just uses a very simple frame buffer driver and we'll get you in go ahead and install linux set it up do your partitioning you're good to go on 21.04 the computer will reboot and it doesn't remember that you said safe graphics so immediately it's going to try to use amd gpu again guess what big black nothing once again oh installer failure basic testing we don't do that hey at least it's not as bad as the fedora installer in this situation which is going to require a more elaborate how-to for me because if you try to install this on fedora you're going to have an even worse time but that's that's a video for another day i just want to i just want to be able to click steam and install my games and do stuff and well steam on ubuntu basically gives you that experience so what you got to do is when you get the menu when the computer boots up you gotta hit e and you gotta go down to the linux line and you gotta add no mode set all one word at the very end of the line the linux line it matters which line then you press control x and your machine will boot up this will also force it to use a very basic frame buffer driver you'll you'll get a graphical prompt here we could have gone to the command line before and fixed this but i'm trying to show you something that's maybe a little bit more noob friendly all right so the crux of the problem here is that you need the firmware there's a binary blob that tells the open source that the open source driver uses that tells the open source driver how to interface with some of the lower level hardware components that thing is not open source but that's not open source in a lot of hardware drivers network cards things like that so amd gets a little bit of a pass on that the problem is that the linux firmware package which normally manages that for ubuntu and fedora and pretty much every other distro typically runs a couple of weeks to a couple of months behind what's actually available on the actual linux firmware git repository you see in this day and age basically all of this stuff is done through git which is a uh you know version control source code management system and the linux firmware get repository was updated basically on launch day as i predicted for the 6600xt so understand what's happening here you basically just need to copy some files out of this git repository so the guide in the level one forum basically you got your your thing installed you did the no mode set the next step is to get clone that get repository you might not have get installed that's okay you're just an apt install away from installing git you'll be good to go and then you just get clone that and then that clones a lot of firmware you don't need all of this you only need what's in the amd gpu folder so again from the command line that's what our cp command does here it's copy cp you know dash a because we want to copy all the sub directories and everything else our amd gpu folder from inside our linuxfirmware.getfolder and copy that to slash user such firmware slash amd gpu so that's going to take our amd gpu binary blobs from our git repo and dump them on the file system now normally i wouldn't recommend doing this this is not something you should do because you're making a mess on your file system you really want the package manager to do this for you in this scenario a little bit of an exception so once you do that should be able to reboot should come right up that's pretty much all that you need to do now if you're wondering okay but is there something more that i can do well it turns out there is so this version of ubuntu is based on kernel 5.11. newer kernels actually work a little bit better amd's added even more stuff but we have to go bleeding edge kernel and that's not something i'm going to cover in this video but it's probably something i can cover in a future video but note at no point in my talking here or anything like that that i say to go to amd.com and download a package or do anything with that sometimes you do see that come up in how-to's there's other how-tos at the level one forum that has that the reason for that is because sometimes the the binary blob messiness is only inside those drivers and so like you have to download them and you can use a couple of things out of them but you don't actually install or use the whole thing you can but it's kind of distro locked so if you're on pop os these steps will basically apply to you perfectly fine perfectly reasonably on pop os whereas if you try the installer from amd.com on pop os it's not going to work now to amd's credit they actually did provide reasonably complete drivers for red hat and which trickles down to centos and trickles down to fedora which is sort of their you know workstation a little bit more update rolling and release kind of thing but because it's red hat and red hat is ultra conservative it's still a little bit rough around the edges still probably better to just use the amd gpu that's in the bleeding edge kernel and grab those binary blobs but hey there you go if you get stuck or you have problems or you can't follow that thread on the level one forums post because you're you're going to help everybody if you need something a little bit more in depth the how-to that i wrote when the 6800 xt launched basically still applies still works but this is a really abbreviated one that will get you up and running with ubuntu 21.04 really quick because the the canonical has basically dotted the eyes and crosses the t's pretty much all you need is that firmware and you can get it from the linux firmware uh the linux firmware the official linux firmware git repository and that is way easier i think than downloading from amd so hopefully you found this helpful i'm one of those level one i'm signing out you can find me in the level one forums hey if you got any other tips and tricks and other fun stuff to pass along let me know oh we also did benchmarking the asrock phantom gaming 6900xt came out on top our test system a ryzen 5950x we did some quickie benchmarking rise of the tomb raker on the linux side yeah over 200 fps with this card at 1080p not a problem see what i mean it's like oh it's a 1080p graphics 200 fps it was just a couple of years ago it was like 60 fps in 1080p that's the 1080p graphics card well admittedly that is an older game what about proton and borderlands 3. borderlands 3 had some really respectable numbers here as well and yes borderlands 3 is not technically supported on linux but it is well supported in a steam client and if you use proton you just check the box that yes i'm taking my life into my own hands and i want to run games on on linux that haven't been officially sanctioned works fine anyway i'm going to hang out the form now i'll see you later [Music]

Channel: Level1Linux

Views: 63,128

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, linux, software, programming, level1, l1, level one, l1Linux, Level1Linux

Id: VSXftsxBpi0

Length: 8min 10sec (490 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021