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I have a laptop with hybrid graphics: Intel + AMD Radeon. I am trying to enable Radeon card, however without success. I have installed drivers according to the AtiHowTo - Debian Wiki:

xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu
firmware-linux-nonfree

Command lspci -nn gives the following output:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:0a16] (rev 0b)    
09:00.0 Display controller [0380]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Topaz XT [Radeon R7 M260/M265 / M340/M360 / M440/M445] [1002:6900] (rev ff)
... (other equipment not involved)

Command dmesg | grep -E 'drm|radeon' | grep -iE 'firmware|microcode' gives no output.

Command xrandr --listproviders gives the following output:

Providers: number : 2
Provider 0: id: 0x75 cap: 0xf, Source Output, Sink Output, Source Offload,      Sink Offload crtcs: 3 outputs: 3 associated providers: 0 name:modesetting
Provider 1: id: 0x4f cap: 0xd, Source Output, Source Offload, Sink Offload crtcs: 0 outputs: 0 associated providers: 0 name:TOPAZ @ pci:0000:09:00.0
Misery
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  • firmware-linux-nonfree should pull firmware-amd-graphics with relevant firmware blobs. When the amdgpu kernel driver is loaded it should trigger the loading of firmware which should be seen with dmesg, but yours shows nothing. It's not even clear on [RadeonFeature](https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/) if this model's kernel driver should default to the radeon driver (because of the line having Sea Islands (CIK) + R7 260) or amdgpu driver (because of the line having Volcanic Islands + TOPAZ). Stock debian kernel 4.9 doesn't enable amdgpu for CIK even if the chip is compatible. – A.B Sep 11 '18 at 22:13

1 Answers1

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I also have a radeon in Debian, and used to have it active in Xorg.

If you wish to use the radeon, the packages you need to use it are:

$ dpkg -l | grep radeon
ii  libdrm-radeon1:amd64                   2.4.74-1                                 amd64        Userspace interface to radeon-specific kernel DRM services -- runtime
ii  radeontool                             1.6.3-1+b1                               amd64        utility to control ATI Radeon backlight functions on laptops
ii  xserver-xorg-video-radeon              1:7.8.0-1+b1                             amd64        X.Org X server -- AMD/ATI Radeon display driver

However, over time, I found out the radeon was bringing a lot of instability to my system, including regular crashes, and disabled it in the kernel, for it to use the Intel one with a kernel parameter in Grub, in /etc/default/grub

radeon.modeset=0

As a collateral side effect of only using the Intel video card, the battery lasts much longer.

Nonetheless, as yours is a different model, give it a try, you might be happy with it.

PS. Honestly, I am in the opinion that if you are not into gaming, high performance graphics or GPU computing that the Radeon does not bring much added value. I prefer to trade battery life for the radeon with the use of the Intel card.

Rui F Ribeiro
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