well, today i (partially) realized why my basic drivers don’t work: the preinstalled packages amdgpu and amdgpu-dkms seem to not work due to amdgpu-dkms being unconfigured. tried configuring it and got the same error. around about there my system stopped using even the iGPU and i had to uninstall some other drivers (thanks @[email protected] )
You typically only have issues if you want to use a newly released card with a distro that doesn’t run a recent kernel or if you want to use GPU compute.
Can confirm:
When I bought an RX Vega 56 on launch day seven years ago and installed it the same day, I had to go with the proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver (on Kubuntu) because the Free drivers didn’t support it yet.
When I bought an RX 9070 XT on launch day two months ago but took a few weeks to install it (because it was wider than my old Vega I had to get a different case, which I spent a little while deciding on), I had to upgrade to the actual latest mainline kernel instead of the one Kubuntu shipped with, but then it “just worked” without any proprietary drivers. (The same would’ve been true had I installed it immediately on launch day as 6.13.5, which added support for it, came out before the card was released.)
Of course, it suddenly occurs to me upon reading this thread that I haven’t tried the new card out with GPGPU or LLM-type stuff yet, and since I’m not using the proprietary driver this time I guess I still need to install ROCm. Oops, LOL.
I’d recommend using OCI containers (docker/podman) there. I was even able to get models working with ROCm on my 780m iGPU that’s not officially supported.