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

Supported models

The AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan is designed to support the following AMD GPUs. For the latest supported hardware, see the AMDVLK page on GitHub:

Radeon™ RX 7900 Series (since 2022.4.4)
Radeon™ RX 6900/6800/6700/6600/6500 Series
Radeon™ RX 5700/5600/5500 Series
Radeon™ RX Vega Series
Radeon™ RX 400/500 Series
Radeon™ Pro WX 9100, x200 Series
Radeon™ Pro W5700/W5500 Series

Hardware detection

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

Vulkan ICD

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

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 4GB RAM

Installation

Enabling 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 use testing ~ packages is not allowed.

The main AMDVLK package 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.

Installing the driver

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) hardware limitation.

Turn on DRI3 and disable modesetting X driver on Xorg

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.

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

From GitHub page:

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.

Also 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.
The driver might still contain bugs. Report if experiencing any trouble.